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Been in the Storm So Long

Been in the
Storm So Long

The Aftermath of Slavery

LEON E LITWACK

Vintage Books
A Division of Random House
New York

°i 73.0 V
Lniba,

First Vintage Books Edition, August 1980
Copyright © 1979 by Leon F. Litwack
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally
published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in May 1979.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Litwack, Leon F.

Been in the storm so long.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Afro-Americans—History—1863-1877.

2. Reconstruction. 3. Southern States—History—
1865-1877. 4. Southern States—Social conditions.

5. Afro-Americans—Southern States—History.

I. Title.

[E185.2.L57 1979b] 973'.0496073 80-11073
ISBN 0-394-74398-9

Manufactured in the United States of America

897

Been in the Storm So Long

Fve been in the storm so long,

You know Fve been in the storm so long,

Oh Lord, give me more time to pray,

Fve been in the storm so long.

I am a motherless child,

Singin’ I am a motherless child,

Singin’ Oh Lord, give me more time to pray,
Fve been in the storm so long.

This is a needy time,

Singin’ Oh Lord, give me more time to pray,
Fve been in the storm so long.

Lord, I need you now,

Singin’ Oh Lord, give me more time to pray,
Fve been in the storm so long.

My neighbors need you now,

Singin’ Oh Lord, give me more time to pray,
Fve been in the storm so long.

My children need you now,

Singin’ Oh Lord, give me more time to pray,
Fve been in the storm so long.

Just look what a shape Fm in,

Cryin’ Oh Lord, give me more time to pray,
Fve been in the storm so long.

-NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACK SPIRITUAL

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

One "The Faithful Slave” 3
Two Black Liberators 64
Three Kingdom Cornin’ 104
Four Slaves No More 167
Five How Free Is Free? 221
Six The Feel of Freedom: Moving About 292
Seven Back to Work: The Old Compulsions 336
Eight Back to Work: The New Dependency 387
Nine The Gospel and the Primer 450
Ten Becoming a People 502

Notes

557

Selected Bibliography and Manuscript Sources
627

Index

637

Preface

T o describe the end of slavery in the South is to re-create a profound
human drama. The story begins with the outbreak of the Civil War,
when the South’s quest for independence immediately underscored its de¬
pendence on black labor and black loyalty and set in motion a social
upheaval that proved impossible to contain. Throughout this devastating
war, and in the immediate aftermath, the two races in the South interacted
in ways that dramatized not only a mutual dependency but the frightening
tensions and ambiguities that had always characterized the "peculiar insti¬
tution.” The extent to which blacks and whites shaped each other’s lives
and destinies and were forced to respond to each other’s presence had never
been more starkly apparent. The truth of W. J. Cash’s observation—"Ne¬
gro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro,
subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every
attitude”—has never been more poignantly acted out. Under the stress of
war, invading armies, and emerging black freedom, pretensions and dis¬
guises fell away and illusions were dissolved, revealing more about the
character of slavery and racial relationships than many white men and
women wished to know or to believe.

The various dimensions of slavery’s collapse—the political machina¬
tions, the government edicts, the military occupation—should not be per¬
mitted to obscure the principal actors in this drama: the four million black
men and women for whom enslavement composed their entire memory.
For many of them, the only world they knew ended at the boundaries of
the plantations and farms on which they toiled; most of them were several
generations removed from the African immigrants who had been torn from
their homeland and shipped in chains to the New World. The distant voices
of Africa still echoed in their music, in their folk tales, in the ways they
worshipped God, and in their kinship relationships. But in 1860 they were
as American as the whites who lorded over them.

The bondage from which black men and women emerged during and
after the Civil War had varied in conditions of living, in degrees of mental
and physical violence, and in the character of ownership. But the education
acquired by each slave was remarkably uniform, consisting largely of les¬
sons in survival and accommodation—the uses of humility, the virtues of
ignorance, the arts of evasion, the subtleties of verbal intonation, the tech¬
niques by which feelings and emotions were masked, and the occasions that
demanded the flattering of white egos and the placating of white fears.
They learned to live with the uncertainties of family life, the drab diet of

xii

Preface

"nigger” food, the whippings and humiliations, the excessive demands on
their labor, the wiles and changing moods of masters and mistresses, the
perverted Chris tianit y of white preachers, and the inhumanities few blacks
would ever forget—a spirited slave reduced to insensibility, a father help¬
less to protect his wife or children, a mother in the forced embrace of the
master or his sons. Not only did most of the slaves learn to endure but they
managed to create a reservoir of spiritual and moral power and kinship ties
that enabled them under the most oppressive of conditions to maintain
their essential humanity and dignity.

The slaves came to learn that the choices available to them were
sharply constricted, that certain expectations would remain unrealized,
that a lifetime could be spent in anticipation and disappointment, that to
place any faith in the promises of white men and women or to misinterpret
their occasional displays of patronizing affection might result in betrayals
and frustrations that were psychologically debilitating. Each generation
complied in its own ways with the demands and expectations of those who
claimed to own them, sucked whatever joy they could out of their lives and
families, and gave birth to still another generation of slaves. But for the
black men and women who lived to experience the Civil War, there would
be the moment when they learned a complex of new truths: they were no
longer slaves, they were free to leave the families they had served, they
could negotiate the terms of their future labor, and they could aspire to the
same rights and privileges enjoyed by their former owners. It is that mo¬
ment—and the days, months, and years that immediately followed—which
this book seeks to capture: the countless ways in which freedom was per¬
ceived and experienced by the black men and women who had been born
into slavery and how they acted on every level to help shape their condition
and future as freedmen and freedwomen.

To describe the significance of freedom to four million black slaves of
the South is to test severely our historical imagination. Perhaps only those
who have endured enslavement and racial oppression are capable of fully
appreciating the various emotions, tensions, and conflicts that such a dra¬
matic change could provoke. The sources for assessing how black freedom
traumatized the white South are abundant, for the war and postwar years
produced a deluge of reactions in letters, journals, diaries, and the press;
indeed, some whites could talk and write of little else in the aftermath of
the war but the dimensions of their defeat and the loss of their chattel. For
the slaves, the sources are no less plentiful but far more elusive. Newly
freed slaves related their perceptions of freedom to Union soldiers, Freed-
men’s Bureau officers, northern visitors, newspaper reporters, clergymen,
missionaries, teachers, and, with somewhat greater caution, to the masters
and mistresses who had formerly owned them. More importantly, they
acted on their perceptions in ways that could not escape the rapt attention
and curiosity of contemporaries eager to ascertain how a once enslaved
population would manifest their freedom and whether they could exercise
responsibly the prerogatives of free men and women.

Preface

xiii

Some seventy years after the Civil War, the Federal Writers’ Project
(a New Deal agency) conducted interviews with more than two thousand
surviving ex-slaves, most of them over eighty years of age. This book draws
on those interviews (along with black testimony in the 1860s) in the belief
that they are especially valuable for illuminating the experiences of freed-
men and freedwomen. The reliability of such testimony has been ques¬
tioned, reflecting concern about the memories of aged people, the biases
and distortions of white interviewers, whether ex-slaves caught up in the
Great Depression might not recall more favorably the relative security—
food, clothing, and shelter—afforded them under bondage, and the likeli¬
hood that black men and women still seeking to survive in the racially
oppressive South of the 1930s might choose to fall back on time-honored
tactics of evasion and selectivity, thinking it expedient to tell whites what
they thought the whites wanted to hear. Such objections suggest not that
these records are invalid but only that historians need to use them with
care and subject them to the same rigorous standards ofhistorical criticism
they would apply to other sources. Fortunately, and not surprisingly, nei¬
ther old age nor the presence of a white interviewer seems to have dimmed
the memories of such a critical event in their lives. Whether they chose to
recall bondage with terror, nostalgia, or mixed feelings, their thoughts,
concerns, and priorities at the moment they ceased to be slaves emerge
with remarkable clarity and seldom conflict significantly with the contem¬
porary historical evidence.

Whatever the surviving sources of black testimony, they have been
compiled largely by white men and women. Not only could the reporter’s
race influence what he chose to record but his unfamiliarity with black
speech patterns affected how he transmitted the material. No attempt has
been made in this book to alter the transcription of Negro dialect, even in
those instances where the white man’s perception of black language seems
obviously and intentionally distorted. But to transpose the dialect into
standard English would only introduce other forms of distortion and
project into black speech the biases and predilections of the modern ob¬
server. For that reason, the reader will simply be asked to keep in mind
the conditions under which black people often related their experiences,
including the circumspection some of them deemed necessary in the pres¬
ence of whites.

Never before had black people in the South found any reason to view
the future with more hope or expectation than in the 1860s. The war and
freedom injected into their lives the excitement of anticipation, encouraged
a new confidence in their own capabilities, and afforded them a rare insight
into the vulnerability and dependency of their "white folks.” For many,
these wgre triumphs in themselves. If their optimism seems misplaced, the
sights which greeted newly freed slaves suggested otherwise—black armies
of occupation, famili es reunited, teachers offering to instruct them, Federal
officials placing thousands of them on abandoned and confiscated lands,
former masters prepared to bargain for their labor, and black missionaries

XIV

Preface

organizing them in churches based upon a free and independent expression
of their Christianity. To measure the significance of emancipation is not to
compare the material rewards of freedom and slavery, as many contempo¬
raries were apt to do, but to appreciate the many and varied ways in which
the newly freed moved to reorder their lives and priorities and the new
assumptions upon which they acted.

Even as many freed blacks found themselves exhilarated by the pros¬
pects for change, the old ways of living, working, and thinking did not die
easily and those who had been compelled to free them immediately
searched for alternative ways to exploit their labor and com m and their
lives. Seldom in history have any people faced tasks so formidable and
challenging as those which four million southern blacks confronted in the
aftermath of the Civil War. This experience, like that of their enslavement,
they could share with no other Americans. Nor was the dominant society
about to rearrange its values and priorities to grant to black Americans a
positive assistance commensurate with the inequalities they had suffered
and the magnitude of the problems they faced. If the ex-slaves were to
succeed, they would have to depend largely on their own resources. Under
these constraints, a recently enslaved people sought ways to give meaning
to their new status. The struggles they would be forced to wage to shape
their lives and destinies as free men and women remain to this day an epic
chapter in the history of the American people.

Leon F. Litwack
Berkeley , California
September 1978

Acknowledgments

A t its inception, this book was to have been a study of black life in the
„ South from the Civil War to the turn of the century. But as the
research progressed, the experience of the newly freed slaves took on a life
of its own and became the primary focus. A John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation Fellowship enabled me to devote a full year to re¬
search and writing. Funds provided by a grant from the National Institute
of Mental Health and a Humanities Research Fellowship from the Univer¬
sity of California at Berkeley afforded me additional time and support to
reformulate the project, conduct further research, and complete the writ¬
ing of the manuscript. The Institute of Social Sciences and the Committee
on Research at the University of California also generously provided funds
for research assistance, travel, and microfilming expenses.

My travels in search of materials ranged from manuscript libraries
and state and federal archives to a remote United States Cemetery outside
of Port Hudson, Louisiana, where the gravestones of black Union soldiers,
many of them marked "unknown,” stand as monuments to that dramatic
moment in American history when armed black men, including recently
freed slaves, marched through the southern countryside as an army of
liberation and occupation. For the courtesies and generous assistance ex¬
tended to me, I am grateful to the staffs of the Duke University Library;
the Fisk University Library; the Henry E. Huntington Library; the Moor¬
land Foundation Library at Howard University; the Louisiana State Uni¬
versity Department of Archives and History; the Library of Congress; the
National Archives; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
New York Public Library; the Southern Historical Collection at the Uni¬
versity of North Carolina; the Historical Society of Pennsylvan i a, the
South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina; the South
Carolina Department of Archives and History; and the Valentine Museum
and State Library in Richmond, Virginia. I should also like to express my
appreciation to the Board of Trustees of the Mother Bethel African Meth¬
odist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia for their kind permission to use and
mirrnfilm The Christian Recorder, a rare and major source of black testi¬
mony from the wartime and postwar South that proved indispensable to
my work.

The opportunity to draw on the knowledge and insights of many
friends and fellow teachers and scholars proved both rewarding and stimu¬
lating. Not all of them fully shared my views or approach but their sugges¬
tions and critical encouragement were deeply valued. For having first

xvi

Acknowledgments

stimulated my interest in the history of slavery and the South, I remain
indebted to my teacher and colleague, Kenneth M. Stampp. I am also
grateful to Allan Nevins for having invited me to join the series he edited
on the Impact of the Civil War—that proved to be the seed of the present
volume. Among my associates at Berkeley, Paula S. Fass, Winthrop D.
Jordan, Lawrence W. Levine, and Robert L. Middlekauff read and criticized
the entire manuscript, bringing to it the insight, imagination, and sen¬
sitivity they have demonstrated so abundantly in their own published
works. While completing his study of slavery, Eugene D. Genovese gener¬
ously took time out to scrutinize early drafts of several chapters and to
share with me his ideas on the "Moment of Truth”; he later read the
completed manuscript and responded with his characteristically sharp and
exacting criticism and warm encouragement. I am no less indebted to Eric
Foner, Nathan I. Huggins, and Ronald G. Walters, each of whom expended
considerable time and energy to read the manuscript and to suggest revi¬
sions which both improved the quality of the text and reduced its size. For
their reactions to individual chapters, I would like to thank Herbert G.
Gutman, James Kindregan, John G. Sproat, Peter H. Wood, and Arthur
Zilversmit. During various stages of the book, I benefited from the assis¬
tance of Joseph Com, Marina Wikramanayake Fernando, Susan Glenn,
Alice Schulman, and Patricia Sheehan. For the thorough and perceptive
reading of the book in page proofs, I am deeply grateful to Cornelia Levine.
For sharing with me her skills in research and languages, Natalie Reid has
my profoundest appreciation. I am also grateful to my editor at Knopf,
Ashbel Green, for his careful reading of the manuscript and judicious
comments.

But finally, this book belongs to my wife, Rhoda, who lived with it for
more than a decade. Neither the dedication nor this brief acknowledgment
adequately recognizes how much her love, personal insight, and support
helped to ease the manuscript through its several passages.

Chapter One

“THE FAITHFUL SLAVE”

Either they deny the Negro's humanity and feel no cause to measure his
actions against civilized norms; or they protect themselves from their
guilt in the Negro's condition and from their fear that their cooks might
poison them, or that their nursemaids might strangle their infant
charges, or that their field hands might do them violence, by attributing
to them a superhuman Capacity for love, kindliness and forgiveness. Nor
does this in any way contradict their stereotyped conviction that all
Negroes (meaning those with whom they have no contact) are given to the
most animal behavior.

RALPH ELLISON 1

R obert Murray could already sense the change in his "white folks.”

^ As a young slave, dividing his time between running errands and
tending the horses, he had been treated tolerably well. "Massa” had been
generous in providing food and clothing, "missus” had ignored both law
and custom to teach several of the slaves to read, and the slave children
had usually found a warm welcome in the Big House. "Been treat us like
we’s one de fambly,” Murray recalled. "Jus’ so we treat de white folks
’spectable an’ wu’k ha’hd.” After the election of Abraham Lincoln, how¬
ever, "it all diffrunt.” The easy familiarity of the master and mistress gave
way to suspicious glances, and the slaves were permitted less freedom of
movement around the place. When the children ventured up to the Big
House, as they had done so often in the past, the master or mistress now
barred their way and offered excuses for not inviting them inside. "Don’ go
in de Big House no mo’, chillun,” Robert Murray’s mother advised them.
"I know whut de trouble. Dey s’pose we all wants ter be free.” 2

On the eve of the Civil War, the more than four million slaves and free
blacks comprised nearly 40 percent of the population of the South. Al¬
though most slaveholders owned less than ten slaves, the majority of slaves
worked as field hands on plantation-size units which held more than
twenty slaves, and at least a quarter of the slave force lived in units of more
than fifty slaves. Even without the added disruption of war, the awesome
presence of so many blacks could seldom be ignored. While to the occa¬
sional visitor they might blend picturesquely into the landscape and seem
almost inseparable from it, native whites were preoccupied with their

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

reality. Oftentimes, in fact, they could talk of little else. Wavering between
moods of condescension, suspicion, and hostility, slaveholding families ac¬
knowledged by their conversations and daily conduct a relationship with
their blacks that was riddled with ambiguity. When the Civil War broke
out, with the attendant problems of military invasion and plantations
stripped of their white males, that ambiguity would assume worrisome
dimensions for some, it would lure others into a false sense of security, and
it would drive still more into fits of anguish.

Within easy earshot of the bombardment ofFort Sumter, Mary Boykin
Chesnut, whose husband was an extensive planter and political leader in
South Carolina, tried in vain to penetrate behind the inscrutable faces of
her servants. Why did they not betray some emotion or interest? How could
they go about their daily chores seemingly unconcerned that their own
destiny might be in the balance but a few miles away? "Not by one word
or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these Negro servants.
Lawrence sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly
indifferent. So are they all. They carry it too far. You could not tell that
they even hear the awful noise that is going on in the bay, though it is
dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they
were chairs and tables, and they make no sign.” This almost studied in¬
difference obviously troubled Mary Chesnut as much as it might have
comforted and reassured her. "Are they stolidly stupid,” she wondered, "or
wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?” 3

The slaves were no less observant of their "white folks.” Although
blacks had always been aware of frailties in their owners, the system of
slavery had been based on the acknowledged power of the white man. But
the Civil War introduced tensions and tragedies into the lives of masters
and mistresses that made them seem less than omnipotent, perhaps even
suddenly human in ways blacks had thought impossible. Rarely had slaves
perceived their owners so utterly at the mercy of circumstances over which
they had no control. Never before had they seemed so vulnerable, so belea¬
guered, so helpless. Unprecedented in the disruptions, stresses, and trauma
it generated among both whites and blacks, the Civil War threatened to
undermine traditional relationships and dissolve long-held assumptions
and illusions. Even if many slaves evinced a human compassion for masters
and mistresses caught in the terrible plight of war, invasion, and death,
how long before these same slaves came to recognize that in the very
suffering of their "white folks” lay their own freedom and salvation?

During the early months, neither the whites nor the blacks appeared to
grasp fully the nature of this war. The mobilization took on an almost
festive air, exposing the slaves to unusual sights and sounds and affording
them a welcome diversion from their day-to-day chores. They watched the

"The Faithful Slave”

military drills with fascination, learned the words of the patriotic songs,
and stood with whites in the courthouse square to listen to the bombastic
and confident speeches. "You’d thought the Confederates goin’ win the
War,” John Wright speculated, after hearing Jefferson Davis address an
enthusiastic crowd in Montgomery, Alabama. "But I notice Massa Wright
look right solemn when we go back home. Don’ believe he ever was sure
the South goin’ win.” When the soldiers prepared to leave for the front, the
festivities gave way to sobering farewells that made a deep impression on
some of the blacks. "Mis’ Polly an’ de ladies got to cryin’,” recalled Sarah
Debro, who spent the war years as a young house slave in a North Carolina
family. "I was so sad dat I got over in de corner an’ cried too.” 4

The patriotic fervor and martial displays suggested a quick and glori¬
ous triumph. So confident was a North Carolina planter that he had his son
candidly explain the issues to the slaves: "There is a war commenced
between the North and the South. If the North whups, you will be as free
a man as I is. If the South whups, you will be a slave all your days.” Before
leaving, the master jokingly told the slaves that he expected to "whup the
North” and be back for dinner. "He went away,” one of his slaves recalled,
"and it wuz four long years before he cum back to dinner. De table wuz
shore set a long time for him. A lot of de white folks said dey wouldn’t be
much war, dey could whup dem so easy. Many of dem never did come back
to dinner.” 5

Neither white nor black Southerners were unaffected by the physical
and emotional demands of the war. Scarcities of food and clothing, for
example, imposed hardships on both races. But the slaves and their mas¬
ters did not share these privations equally; black families could ill afford
any reduction in their daily allowances, and they observed with growing
bitterness that provisions needed to sustain them were often dispatched to
the Army or hoarded for the comfort of their "white folks.” Reduced diets
opened the way for all kinds of ailments in weak and undernourished
bodies, and yet there was no corresponding reduction in the hours of labor
demanded of the slaves or in the diligence with which they were expected
to carry out their assigned tasks. Later in the war, depredations committed
by both Confederate and Union soldiers nearly exhausted the food supplies
in some regions, and many a slave repeated the complaint made by Pauline
Grice of Georgia: "De year ’fore surrender, us am short of rations and
sometime us hongry.... Dey [the soldiers] done took all de rations and us
couldn’t eat de cotton.” Even earlier, the shortage of food had driven slaves
to the point of desperation; incidents of theft mounted steadily, some slaves
went out on foraging missions (with the tacit consent of their owners),
while still others preferred to risk flight to the Yankees rather than experi¬
ence constant hunger. When asked if the Emancipation Proclamation had
prompted his flight to the nearest Union camp, one slave responded, "No,
missus, we never hear nothing like it. We’s starvin’, and we come to get
somfin’ to eat. Dat’s what we come for.” 6

Despite the wartime shortages, slaves were reluctant to surrender the
traditional privileges they had wrested from their owners. Any master, for

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

example, who decided to dispense with the usual Saturday-night dances,
the annual barbecue, the "big supper” expected after a slave wedding, or
the Christmas holiday festivities might find himself unable to command
the respect and labor of his slaves. Nor did servants who enjoyed dressing
up in their master’s or mistress’s cast-off finery to attend church believe
that the Confederacy’s strictures on extravagance and ostentatious display
applied to them. But no matter how disagreeable patriotic whites now
found these displays, many slaveholders thought it best to tolerate them
as a way of maintaining and rewarding loyalty in their blacks. When slaves
dressed up in fine clothes, one white woman observed, they became "merry,
noisy, loquacious creatures, wholly unconscious of care or anxiety.” Such
diversions presumably took their minds off the larger implications of the
war and rendered them more content with their position—at least, many
whites preferred to think so. 7

The extent of the slaves’ exposure to the war varied considerably, with
those residing in the threatened and occupied regions obviously bearing
the brunt of the disruptions along with the white families they served. In
some sections of the South, however, life went on as usual, there were
ample provisions, the white men remained at home, the slaves performed
their daily routines, and the fighting remained distant. "The War didn’t
change nothin’,” Felix Haywood of Texas recalled. "Sometimes you didn’t
knowed it was goin’ on. It was the endin’ of it that made the difference.”
By sharp contrast, a former Mississippi slave remembered feeling as
though "the world was come to the end,” and Emma Hurley, who had been
a slave in Georgia, recalled the war years as "the hardest an’ the saddest
days” she had ever experienced. "Everybody went ’round like this [she took
up her apron and buried her face in it]—they kivered their face with
what-somever they had in their hands that would ketch the tears. Sorrow
an’ sadness wuz on every side.” 8

Even if the issues at stake were sometimes unclear, slaves could only
marvel at a war that sent white men off to kill other white men, made a
battleground of the southern countryside, and threatened to maim or de¬
stroy an entire generation of young free men. Recalling his most vivid
impressions of the war, William Rose, who had been a slave in South
Carolina, told of a troop train he had seen carrying Confederate soldiers
to the front lines.

And they start to sing as they cross de trestle. One pick a banjo, one
play de fiddle. They sing and whoop, they laugh; they holler to de people

on de ground, and sing out, "Good-bye.” All going down to die_

De train still rumble by. One gang of soldier on de top been playing
card. I see um hold up de card as plain as day, when de luck fall right.

They going to face bullet, but yet they play card, and sing and laugh like
they in their own house-All going down to die.

The scenes witnessed by slaves in the aftermath of battles fought near their
homes would never be forgotten. Martha Cunningham, who had been

"The Faithful Slave”

raised near Knoxville, Tennessee, recalled walking over hundreds of dead
soldiers lying on the ground and listening to the groans of the dying.
William Walters and his mother, both of them fugitives from a plantation
in Tennessee, watched the wounded being carried to a clearing across the
road from where they had sought refuge—"fighting men with arms shot off,
legs gone, faces blood smeared—some of them just laying there cussing God
and Man with their dying breath!” 9

The tales of self-sacrifice and martial heroism that would inspire fu¬
ture generations hardly suggested the savagery, the destructiveness, the
terrifying and dehumanizing dimensions of this war. The initial exultation
and military pomp had barely ended before the streams of wounded and
maimed returned to their homes. Few slaves were immune to the human
tragedies that befell the families to whom they belonged. They had known
them too well, too intimately not to be affected in some way. "Us wus boys
togedder, me en Marse Hampton, en wus jist er bout de same size,” Abram
Harris recalled. "Hit sho did hurt me when Marse Hampton got kilt kase
I lubed dat white man.” The tragedies that befell the Lipscomb family in
South Carolina provoked one of their slaves, Lorenza Ezell, beyond mere
compassion to outright anger and a desire for revenge. As he would later
remember that reaction:

All four my young massas go to de war, all but Elias. He too old. Smith,
he kilt at Manassas Junction. Nathan, he git he finger shot at de first
round at Fort Sumter. But when Billy was wounded at Howard Gap in
North Carolina and dey brung him home with he jaw split open, I so mad
I could have kilt all de Yankees. I say I be happy iffen I could kill me jes’
one Yankee. I hated dem ’cause dey hurt my white people. Billy was
disfigure awful when he jaw split and he teeth all shine through he cheek.

The sight of a once powerful white man reduced to an emotional or physical
cripple, returning home without a leg or an arm, looking "so ragged an’
onery” as to be barely recognizable, generated some strong and no doubt
some mixed emotions in the slaves, as did the spectacle of the whites
grieving over a death. That was the first time, Nancy Smith recalled, "I had
ever seed our Mist’ess cry. She jus’ walked up and down in de yard a-
wringin’ her hands and cryin’. 'Poor Benny’s been killed,’ she would say
over and over.” After witnessing such scenes, another ex-slave recalled,
"you would cry some wid out lettin your white folks see you.” 10

If the plight of their masters moved some slaves to tears, that was by
no means a universal reaction. Grief and the forced separation from loved
ones were hardly new experiences in the lives of many slaves. To witness
the discomfiture of white men and women suffering the same personal
tragedies and disruptions they had inflicted on others might produce am¬
biguous feelings, at best, or even be a source of immense gratification. Delia
Garlic, for example, was working as a field hand on a Louisiana plantation
when the war broke out. Bom in Virginia, and sold three times, she had

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

been separated from the rest of her family. "Dem days was hell,” she would
recall of her bondage.

Babies was snatched from dere mother’s breas’ an’ sold to speculators.
Chilluns was separated from sisters an’ brothers an’ never saw each other
ag’in. Course dey cry; you t hink dey not cry when dey was sold lak cattle?

... It’s bad to belong to folks dat own you soul an’ body; dat can tie you
up to a tree, wid yo’ face to de tree an’ yo’ arms fastened tight aroun it;
who take a long curlin’ whip an’ cut de blood ever’ lick. Folks a mile away
could hear dem awful whippings. Dey was a tumble part of livin’.

The most vivid impression she retained of the war was the day the master’s
two sons left for military service and the obvious grief that caused her
owners. "When dey went off de Massa an’ missis cried, but it made us glad
to see dem cry. Dey made us cry so much.” On the plantation in Alabama
where Henry Baker spent his childhood, the news spread quickly through
the slave quarters that Jeff Coleman, a local white man who once served
on the detested slave patrols, had been killed in the war. "De 'niggers’ jes
shouted en shouted,” Baker recalled, "dey wuz so glad he wuz dead cause
he wuz so mean tuh dem.” 11

No matter how desperately white families might seek to hide or over¬
come their anguish and fear in the presence of the slaves, the pretense
could not always be sustained. No one, after all, had more experience in
reading their faces and discerning their emotions than the slaves with
whom they had shared their lives. No one had a shrewder insight into their
capacity for self-deception and dissembling. Even as the white South had
mobilized for war, some slaves had sensed how a certain anxiety tempered
the talk of Confederate invincibility. With each passing month, few slaves
could have remained oblivious to the fact that the anticipated quick and
easy victory had become instead a prolonged and costly slaughter. Nor
could they fail to see with their own eyes how the realities of war had a
way of mocking the rhetoric that celebrated its heroism, even robbing their
once powerful "white folks” of the last remnants of human dipity. A
former Tennessee slave remembered the death of Colonel McNairy, who
had vowed to wade in blood before he would allow his fa mil y to perform
the chores of servants. "He got blown to pieces in one of the first battles
he fought in. They wasn’t sure it was him but you know they had special
kinHs of clothes and they found pieces of his clothes and they thought he
was blown to pieces from that.” Bob Jones, who had been raised on a North
Carolina plantation, would never forget the day some Confederate soldiers
brought home the body of his master’s son who had been killed in action.
"I doan ’member whar he wus killed but he had been dead so long dat he
had turned dark, an’ Sambo, a little nigger, sez ter me, 'I thought, Bob, dat
I’ud turn white when I went ter heaben but hit ’pears ter me lak de white
folkses am gwine ter turn black.’ ” 12

Although embellished considerably by postwar writers, those classic
wartime scenes which depicted the faithful slaves consoling the "white

"The Faithful Slave”

folks” in their bereavement were by no means rare. With everyone weeping
so profusely, white and black alike, and some whites on the verge of hyste¬
ria, Louis Cain, a former North Carolina slave, thought it "a wonder we
ever did git massa buried.” That blacks should have shared in the grief of
the very whites who held them as slaves, in a war fought in large part over
their freedom, underscored in so many ways the contradictions and am¬
bivalence that characterized the "peculiar institution.” Many of these
same slaves, after all, would later "betray” their owners and welcome the
Yankees as liberators. As a young slave on a Virginia plantation, Booker
T. Washington listened to the fervent prayers for freedom and shared the
excitement with which his people awaited the arrival of the Union Army.
Yet the news that "Mars’ Billy” had been killed in the war had profoundly
affected these same slaves. "It was no sham sorrow,” Washington would
later write, "but real. Some of the slaves had nursed 'Mars’ Billy’; others
had played with him when he was a child. 'Mars’ Billy’ had begged for
mercy in the case of others when the overseer or master was thrashing
them. The sorrow in the slave quarter was only second to that in the 'big
house.’ ” When two of the master’s sons subsequently returned home with
severe wounds, the slaves were anxious to assist them, some volunteering
to sit up through the night to attend them. To Washington, there was
nothing strange or contradictory about such behavior; the slaves had sim¬
ply demonstrated their "kindly and generous nature” and refused to betray
a trust. On the plantation in Alabama where she labored under a tyranni¬
cal master and mistress, a young black woman who had been separated by
sale from three of her own four children grieved over the death of the
master’s son. "Marster Ben, deir son, were good, and it used to hurt him
to see us ’bused. When de war came Marster Ben went—no, der ole man
didn’t go—an’ he were killed dere. When he died, I cried.... He were a kind
chile. But de oders, oh, dear.” 13

Whatever the degree of empathy slaves could muster for the bereave¬
ment of their "white folks,” the uncertainty it introduced into their own
lives could hardly be ignored. With the death of her master, Anna Johnson
recalled, the mistress went to live with her parents and the plantation was
sold "and us wid it.” Pauline Grice remembered that her mistress eventu¬
ally recovered from the death of her son "but she am de difFrent woman.”
If only as a matter of self-interest, then, slaves were likely to view each new
casualty list with considerable trepidation. Rather than unite blacks and
whites in a common grief, news of the death of a master or a son might
unsettle the remaining family members to the point of violent hysteria,
with the slaves as the most accessible and logical targets upon whom they
could turn their wrath. No sooner had the two sons of Annie Row’s master
enlisted than his behavior became even more volatile. "Marster Charley
cuss everything and every body and us watch out and keep out of his way.”
The day he received news of the death of one of his sons proved to be
particularly memorable:

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Missy starts cryin’ and de Marster jumps up and starts cussin’ de War
and him picks up de hot poker and say, "Free de nigger, will dey? I free
dem.” And he hit my mammy on de neck and she starts moanin' and
cryin’ and draps to de floor. Dere ’twas, de Missy a-moumin’, my mammy
a-moanin’ and de Marster a-cussin’ loud as him can. Him takes de gun
oflen de rack and starts for de field whar de niggers am a-workin’. My
sister and I sees that and we’uns starts runnin’ and screamin’, ’cause
we’uns has brothers and sisters in de field.

Before the war, Mattie Curtis recalled, her mistress had been "purty good”
but the war turned her into "a debil iffen dar eber wus one,” and after
hearing of the death of her son she whipped the slaves "till she shore miff
wore out.” 14

The temperaments of white slaveholding families fluctuated even
more violently than usual, reflecting not only the casualty lists but news
of military setbacks, the wartime privations, the reports of slave disaffec¬
tion, and the familiar problems associated with running a plantation. Ev¬
ery slave was subject to the day-to-day whims of those who owned him, and
even the kindest masters and mistresses had their bad days. "Dere was
good white folks, sah, as well as bad,” an elderly freedman remarked, after
being asked his opinion of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "but when they was bad,
Lord-a-mercy, you never saw a book, sah, that come up to what slavery
was.” If the Civil War could in some instances drive the plantation whites
and blacks closer together, revealing a mutual dependency and sympathy,
the shocks of war and invasion, coupled with the fears of emancipation,
were as likely to bring out the very worst in the human character. "You
see,” a Virginia freedman explained, "the masters, soon as they found out
they couldn’t keep their slaves, began to treat them about as bad as could
be. Then, because I made use of this remark, that I didn’t think we colored
folks ought to be blamed for what wasn’t our fault, for we didn’t make the
war, and neither did we declare ourselves free,—just because I said that,
not in a saucy way, but as I say it to you now, one man put a pistol to my
head, and was going to shoot me. I got away from him, and left.” 15

The specter of emancipation, along with the increased demands of the
war, had a way of dissolving the posture of beneficence on the plantation.
Fearful of losing his slaves, a master might work them incessantly, deter¬
mined to drain everything he could from his suddenly precarious invest¬
ment. "Massa Jeems cussed and ’bused us niggers more’n ever,” Wes Brady
recalled, "but he took sick and died and stepped off to Hell ’bout six months
’fore we got free.” It had been bad enough before the war, Harry Jarvis said
of the plantation on which he worked, "but arter de war come, it war wus
nor eber. Fin’ly, he [the master] shot at me one day, ’n I reckoned I’d stood
it ’bout’s long’s I could, so I tuk to der woods. I lay out dere for three weeks.”
Charlie Moses, who had been a slave in Mississippi, remembered only that
his master, after spending a year in the Army, returned home "even
meaner than before.” 18

"The Faithful Slave”

If a master chose to serve in the war, his absence from the plantation
for extended periods of time created a critical vacuum in authority. Al¬
though slaves might seek to exploit such a situation to their own advan¬
tage, the alteration of power relationships on the plantation did not always
redound to their benefit. Unaccustomed to her new responsibilities, the
plantation mistress was apt to be even more easily moved to ill temper than
the master, possessing neither the patience nor the experience of her hus¬
band in dealing on a day-to-day basis with field slaves and work routines.
"I tell [you] candidly,” a South Carolina woman wrote her husband in the
Confederate Congress, "this attention to farming is up hill work with me.
I can give orders first-rate, but when I am not obeyed, I can’t keep my
temper.... I am ever ready to give you a helping hand, but I must say I
am heartily tired of trying to manage free negroes.” Equally dismayed at
the "follies & sins” committed by black servants, a South Carolina widow
thought the day might come when they would have to be eliminated "as
rats & cockroaches are by all sorts of means whenever they become unbear¬
able.” 17

If close contact had led some slaves to identify with the master or
mistress, it had afforded others an education in the devious ways of their
"white folks” and how even the best-intentioned and kindest of them could
be transformed and degraded by the power they wielded. This was no less
true of the mistress than the master. The gracious and maternal lady of
southern legend, who reputedly tempered the harshness of slavery, was not
entirely the figment of chivalrous white imaginations, but from the per¬
spective of many black slaves, abnormal wartime conditions in some in¬
stances only exacerbated previously unstable personalities. It seemed to
Lulu Wilson that her mistress "studied ’bout meanness” more than her
master, and she blamed the blindness in her later life on the snuff her
mistress had occasionally rubbed in her eyes as a punishment. With the
master away during the war, the mistress’s disposition only worsened.
"Wash Hodges was gone away four years and Missus Hodges was meaner’n
the devil all the time. Seems like she jus’ hated us worser than ever. She
said blabber-mouth niggers done cause a war.” 18

Confronted with a mistress who was "a demon, just like her husband,”
Esther Easter may not have been unique in the satisfaction she derived
from playing one "demon” against the other. Taking advantage of the
wartime disruptions and her access to the Big House, she finally found a
way to even the score.

While Master Jim is out fighting the Yanks, the Mistress is fiddling
round with a neighbor man, Mister Headsmith. I is young then, but I
knows enough that Master Jim’s going be mighty mad when he hears
about it.

The Mistress didn’t know I knows her secret, and I’m fixing to even
up for some of them whippings she put off on me. That’s why I tell Master
Jim next time he come home.

"See that crack in the wall?” Master Jim say yes, and I say, "It’s just

been in the storm so long

like the open door when the eyes are close to the wall.” He peek and see

into the bedroom. ,

"That’s how I find out about the Mistress and Mister Headsmith,

I tells him, and I see he’s getting mad.

"What you mean?” And Master Jim grabs me hard by the arm like

I was trying to get away.

"I see them in the bed.”

That’s all I say. The Demon’s got him and Master Jim tears out of
the room looking for the Mistress. Then I hears loud talking and pretty
soon the Mistress is screaming and calling for help .. - 19

To T pgiTitjnn discipline and productivity among an enslaved work force
under wartime conditions often required extraordinary efforts, for in the
relative absence of white males with horses and firearms, slave restless¬
ness, disaffection, and covert resistance might grow markedly. To a Vir¬
ginia woman, it seemed like her slaves were trying "to see what amount
of thieving they pan commit”; to a North Carolina woman, the slaves had
become, in her husband’s absence, "awkward, inefficient, and even lazy ;
to a Mississippi woman, pleading with the governor to release her overseer
from militia duty, the slaves were not even performing half the usual
amount of work. The women of the Pettigrew family of South Carolina,
finding themselves suddenly in charge of the plantation, fought a losing
battle to assert their authority among the slaves. As early as 1862, they
confessed their doubts that "things will ever be or seem quite the same
again.” Later in the year, Caroline Pettigrew wrote her husband that she
could feel no confidence in any of the slaves. "You will find that they have
all changed in their manner, not offensive but slack.

Not surpr isingl y, in the master’s absence, the slaves were quick to test
the mistress’s authority, seeking to ascertain if she could be more easily
outmaneuvered or manipulated than her husband. To those women forced
to undergo such trials, the motivation of the slaves seemed perfectly obvi¬
ous, with some of them relishing every moment of discomfiture evinced by
their owners. After being left in charge of a plantation in Texas, Mrs. W.
H. Neblett kept her husband informed of the steady deterioration of disci¬
pline and the heavy price she was paying in mental anguish. "[T]he black
wretches [are] trying all they can, it seems to me, to agrivate me, taking
no interest, having no care about the future, neglecting their duty. Nei¬
ther her presence nor the harsh treatment meted out by the overseer had
produced the desired results. The blacks refused to work, they abused and
neglected the stock, they tore down fences and broke plows, and it did little
good to give them any orders. "With the prospect of another 4 years war,”
she wrote her husband in the spring of 1864, "you may give your negroes
away if you wont hire them, and I’ll move into a white settlement and work
with my hands.... The negroes care no more for me than if I was an old
free darkey and I get so mad sometimes that I think I don’t care sometimes
if Myers beats the last one of them to death. I cant stay with them another
year alone.” 21

"The Faithful Slave ”

Not all the women left in charge of plantations capitulated that easily.
When unable to control their slaves, some mistresses called upon the assis¬
tance of local authorities or a neighboring planter to mete out punishment.
After ordering local police to apprehend and jail a rebellious slave, a South
Carolina woman derived considerable personal satisfaction from the way
she had handled the matter. "What do you think,” she wrote to her son,
"I at last made up my mind to have Caesar punished, after daily provoking
& impertinent conduct,... & it was all done so quietly, that the household
did not know of it, though I let him stay 2 days in Confinement.” Some
women, on the other hand, needed little assistance or instruction in manag¬
ing their enslaved labor but demonstrated a shrewdness and strength that
compared favorably to that of their absent husbands. Refusing to panic or
leave matters to the overseer, Ida Dulany, the mistress of a Virginia planta¬
tion, quelled a work stoppage by selling some of the slaves, hiring others
out, removing a third group to a separate area, and whipping one of the
leaders. To make certain that those who remained did their work properly,
she visited the fields herself. 22

Where overseers were employed, the absence of the master also dis¬
rupted the prevailing structure of authority. No longer able to play the
overseer against the master, deriving what advantages they could from
that division of power, slaves found themselves at the mercy of men who
could finally rule them with an unrestrained hand. Andy Anderson, for
example, recalled his experience on a cotton plantation in Texas, working
for a master, Jack Haley, who was so "kind to his cullud folks” that neigh¬
bors referred to them as "de petted niggers.” When the war broke out,
Haley enlisted in the Army and hired a man named Delbridge to oversee
the plantation.

After dat, de hell start to pop, ’cause de first thing Delbridge do is cut de
rations.... He half starve us niggers and he want mo’ work and he start
de whippin’s. I guesses he starts to educate ’em. I guess dat Delbridge go
to hell when he died, but I don’t see how de debbil could stand him.

Unsuccessful in an escape attempt, Anderson was severely whipped and
then sold, but when his old master returned from military service, he
promptly admonished and fired the overseer. 23

The enhanced authority of the overseer was as likely to disrupt as to
secure a plantation. While the master remained away, slaves were even
more sensitive to any action by an overseer that appeared to breach the
normal limits of his authority. No longer able to appeal their differences
with him to the master, the slaves on some plantations took matters into
their own hands. After her master left for the war, Ida Henry recalled, the
overseer tried to impress the slaves with his new importance and power.
He worked them overtime and meted out harsh punishment to anyone who
failed to meet his expectations, until "one day de slaves caught him and one
held him whilst another knocked him in de head and killed him.” On three

been in the storm so long

large Louisiana plantations, near the mouth of the Red River, the slaves
responded to the food shortage and a newly ordered reduction in rations
by dividing up among themselves the hogs and poultry. When advised by
the absent owner to punish these slaves, the overseers wisely refused on the
grounds of personal safety. 24

As an incentive to maintain order and maximize production, some
masters chose to delegate authority in their absence to the slaves them¬
selves. Andrew Goodman, who had worked on a Texas plantation, recalled
not knowing "what the war was ’bout.” But he readily appreciated its
impact the day his master assembled the sixty-six slaves and told them of
his plans to enlist in the Army, discharge the overseer, and leave the place
in Goodman’s hands. The master remained away for four years. Appreciat¬
ing the confidence placed in them, the slaves left in charge of a plantation
—often the same slaves who had been drivers or foremen—generally
fulfilled the master’s expectations, and in some instances even exceeded
them. "I done the bes’ I could,” a former Alabama slave recalled, "but they
was troublous times. We was afraid to talk of the war, ’cose they hung three
men for talkin’ of it, jest below here.” With both the master and overseer
absent, some slaves exulted in the greater degree of independence they
enjoyed. The fact of a black "master,” however, could prove to be a mixed
blessing, with some drivers fulfilling their owner’s expectations by main¬
taining a severe regime. When a former coachman took charge of a planta¬
tion in Alabama, one of the slaves recalled, "he made de niggers wuk
harder dan Ole Marster did.” 25

Neither the expedient of a black driver nor an overseer necessarily
resolved the dilemma posed by the absence of the master. To judge by the
lamentations that abounded in the journals, diaries, and letters of women
left in charge of plantations, many of them simply resigned themselves to
an increasingly untenable situation over which they could exert a mini¬
mum of influence and authority. "We are doing as best we know,” a Georgia
woman sighed, "or as good as we can get the Servants to do; they learn to
feel very independent as no white man comes to direct them.” When slaves
on a plantation in Texas openly resisted the overseer’s authority, refusing
to submit to any whippings, the mistress thought it best to avoid a show¬
down. Nothing would be gained by whipping the slaves, she wrote her
husband, who was absent in the Army, "so I shall say nothing and if they
stop work entirely I will try to feel thankful if they let me alone.” 26

Nor did the presence of the master necessarily help. The difficulties in
maintaining control and discipline pointed up ambiguities that had always
suffused plantation relationships. But the apprehensions now voiced by
beleaguered owners had even larger implications. The spectacle of a mas¬
ter and his family tormented and rendered helpless in the face of war¬
time stresses and demands could not help but make a deep impression on
the slaves. To what extent they would seek to exploit that vulnerability to
their own advantage came increasingly to dominate the conversations of
whites.

With tens of thousands of white men joining the Confederate Army,
leaving their families behind them on isolated plantations and farms, the
quality of black response to the Civil War assumed a critical and urgent
importance. Few whites could be insensitive to the exposed position in
which the presence of so many enslaved blacks placed them. "'Last night,”
a Georgia woman wrote her son, "I felt the loneliness and isolation of my
situation in an unusual degree. Not a white female of my acquaintance
nearer than eight or ten miles, and not a white person nearer than the
depot!” Amidst several hundred slaves, the mistress of a North Carolina
plantation compared herself to "a kind of Anglo-Saxon Robinson Crusoe
with Ethiopians only for companions—think of it!” Demonstrating a rare
candor, a Confederate soldier from Mississippi, who had left his wife and
children "to the care of the niggers,” thought it unlikely that his twenty-
five slaves would turn upon them. "They’re ignorant poor creatures, to be
sure, but as yet they’re faithful. Any way, I put my trust in God, and I know
he’ll watch over the house while I’m away fighting for this good cause.” 27

This was hardly the time for self-doubt. Whatever previous experience
might have suggested about the fragile nature of the master-slave relation¬
ship, an embattled Confederacy, struggling for the very survival of that
relationship, preferred to think differently and employed a rhetorical over¬
kill to attain the necessary peace of mind. "A genuine slave owner, born
and bred, will not be afraid of Negroes,” Mary Chesnut confided to her
diary in November 1861. "Here we are mild as the moonbeams, and as
serene; nothing but Negroes around us, white men all gone to the army.”
That was the proper spirit of confidence, voiced by a woman who had
already confessed failure in her attempts to understand what the slaves
thought of the war. Most whites, like Mary Chesnut, no matter what suspi¬
cions and forebodings they harbored, chose to put on the best possible face,
to demonstrate their own serenity and composure. The alternatives were
simply too horrible to contemplate. "We would be practically helpless
should the Negroes rise,” the daughter of a prominent Louisiana planter
conceded, "since there are so few men left at home. It is only because the
Negroes do not want to kill us that we are still alive.” 28

Whether to overcome their own anxieties or to silence the skeptics,
many whites flaunted pretensions to security. "We have slept all winter
with the doors of our house, outside and inside, all unlocked,” a Virginia
woman boasted in 1862. All too often, however, the incessant talk and
repeated assurances betrayed something less than the confidence whites
professed. Edmund Ruffin, for example, an ardent secessionist and de¬
fender of slavery, was obsessed with the question of security even as he
sought to demonstrate his own unconcern. Almost daring the slaves to defy
his expectations, he described in minute detail (albeit within the confines

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

of his diary) the ease with which blacks could enter his room. Nor did he
think himself unique in his unconcern. "[T]t may be truly said that every
house & family is every night perfectly exposed to any attempt of our slaves
to commit robbery or murder. Yet we all feel so secure, & are so free from
all suspicion of such danger, that no care is taken for self-protection—& in
many cases, as in mine, not even the outer door is locked.

To have believed anything less would have been not only impolitic but
subversive of the very institution on which the Confederacy claimed to rest.
The "corner-stone” of the new government, affirmed Vice-President Alex¬
ander Stephens in March 1861, "rests upon the great truth, that the negro
is not equal to the white man; that slavery-subordination to the superior
race—is his natural and normal condition.” Wherever he traveled in the
South, an English visitor observed in 1861, he found absolute confidence
that this subordination would be maintained. To resolve any doubts, a
slaveholder might choose to parade some of his more obsequious specimens
before the curious visitor, favor them with some humorous and familiar
remarks, and then ply them with the obvious questions. In making his
response, the slave usually had little difficulty in discerning what was
expected of him. "Are you happy?” the slave is asked. Yas, sar, he replies
without hesitation. "Show how you’re happy,” the slaveholder demands. As
if he had acted out this scenario many times before, the slave rubs his
stomach and grins with delight, "Yummy! yummy! plenty belly full!” and
the satisfied slaveholder turns to the visitor and remarks, "That’s what I
call a real happy feelosophical chap. I guess you’ve got a lot in your country
can’t pat their stomachs and say, 'yummy, yummy, plenty belly full!’ ” 30

With few exceptions, the southern press expounded this kind of confi¬
dence, secure in the belief that "there was never a period in the history of
the country when there was more perfect order and quiet among the servile
classes.” In the Confederate Congress, a Virginian boasted that the slaves’
loyalty was "never more conspicuous, their obedience never more child¬
like.” In the eyes of some slaveholders, of course, that observation might
have prompted more alarm than relief. Rather than face up to such impli¬
cations, however, the press and southern leaders made the most out of
conspicuous examples of black support for the Confederacy, dutifully
paradin g every such act as additional testimony to the beneficence of slav¬
ery and the attachment of slaves to their "white folks.” When a slave
became the first subscriber to the Confederate war loan in Port Gibson,
Mississippi, for example, the local newspaper exulted: The feeling at the
South can be learned from this little incident. The negroes are ready to
fight for their people, and they are ready to give money as well as their lives
to the cause of their masters.” 31

If slaves deemed it politic to proffer their support and services, particu¬
larly in the early stages of the war, free blacks moved with an even greater
sense of urgency to protest their loyalty and allay the suspicions of a white
society which had always found them to be an anomaly and source of
danger. In the decade preceding the outbreak of war, the more than 182,000

'The Faithful Slave”

free blacks had faced growing harassment, increased surveillance, and
demands for still further restrictions on their freedom. To identify with the
white community in this time of crisis might hopefully serve to neutralize
that opposition and improve their precarious position in southern society.
In New Orleans and Charleston, where small colored elites had established
churches, schools, and benevolent associations, the efforts to identify with
whites were more conspicuous, their aloofness from the slaves was more
pronounced, and their patriotic gestures tended to be more strident. In a
memorial to the state governor, a group of free Negroes in Charleston,
including a number of substantial property holders, could hardly have been
more candid about their attachment to the common cause: "In our veins
flows the blood of the white race, in some half, in others much more than
half white blood, ... our attachments are with you, our hopes and safety
and protection from you, ... our allegiance is due to South Carolina and
in her defense, we will offer up our lives, and all that is dear to us.” 32

Clearly, the threat of invasion and the depredations of "alien” troops
were capable of unifying diverse and conflicting groups in the South. Those
free blacks who had managed to accumulate property were no doubt intent
on protecting their investments, along with whatever privileges they en¬
joyed in a slave society. If some slaves and free Negroes later compared
support of the Confederacy to the black driver forced to use the lash on his
fellow slaves, still others made no apologies. When offering his support,
Bowman Seals, a free black from Clayton, Alabama, claimed to understand
fully "the quarrel” between the North and the South and how it affected
his people. "I make no claim to be adversed to their best interests; but I
know enough of Yankees and of their treatment of the starving blacks
among them to understand that their war upon the South is prompted by
no love of us, but only by envy and hatred, and by an intermeddling and
domineering spirit.” If the North should succeed, Seals warned, "disorder
and ruin” and "extremist want and misery” would be visited upon all
classes and both races. 33

Had it not been for the exemplary conduct of "the faithful slave,” some
white Southerners doubted that the war could have lasted for more than
ten months. Hence the paeans of praise that would be heaped upon those
black men and women who had stood with their masters and mistresses,
the oratorical tributes to their loyalty, the monuments erected to their
memory, and the romantic images and legends that would be elaborated
upon to comfort and entertain generations of whites. The proven fidelity
of such individuals even permitted slaveholders to indulge themselves with
the notion of slaves as part of the extended family. "We never thought of
them as slaves,” a Florida woman recalled, "they were 'ours,’ 'our own dear
black folks.’ ” Underscoring this same theme, a Richmond woman remem¬
bered her slaves as "the repositories of our family secrets. They were our
confidants in all our trials. They joyed with us and they sorrowed with us;
they wept when we wept, and they laughed when we laughed. Often our
best friends, they were rarely our worst enemies.” Even where the wartime

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

evidence was at best inconclusive, many whites chose to dwell upon the
supportive side of black behavior. When "massa” came home on leave, a
Mississippi woman wrote, "no one showed himself [sic] more happy to see
him than 'Mammy’ as she fell upon the floor at his feet hugging and kissing
him 'My Massa come.’ 'My Massa come.’ I would be so glad if some of our
northern friends could have seen her.” 34

If only masters and mistresses had been less insistent about their sense
of security and equanimity, they might have been more believable. No
matter how many times he heard slaveholders profess confidence in their
blacks, William Russell, an English visitor, remained skeptical. After his
extensive travels and conversations in the South during the early months
of the war, he came away feeling that the very demeanor of the slaves
suggested less than contentment with their lot. If these were the happiest
creatures on earth, as he had been assured, how was he to explain the "deep
dejection” he observed on so many of their faces. On a "model” Louisiana
plantation he visited, where "there were abundant evidences that they
were well treated,” the slaves "all looked sad, and even the old woman who
boasted that she had held her old owner in her arms when he was an infant,
did not smile cheerfully.” If these were such docile and passive people,
moreover, as he had also been assured, how was he to explain the elaborate
police precautions, the increased vigilance, the curfews, the night patrols.
"There is something suspicious,” Russell concluded, "in the constant never-
ending statement that 'we are not afraid of our slaves.’ ” 35

Even as many masters and mistresses struck a pose of confidence and
equanimity, few were unaware of the slaves’ demonstrated capacity for
evasiveness and dissimulation in the presence of whites. No matter how
often slave owners kept reassuring themselves, the doubts and apprehen¬
sions were bound to surface. With each passing month, as the issues became
clearer and the position of the Confederacy deteriorated, the ambiguities
in the slave response would tend to dissolve and the whites who had pro¬
claimed the loudest the faithfulness of their blacks were among those
forced to reassess their perceptions in accordance with personal experi¬
ences. If the shock of recognition did not come easily for a people who had
always claimed an intimate knowledge of the black personality, neither
was it altogether unexpected; some whites, in fact, thought they knew their
slaves too well to harbor any illusions about the future. "The tenants act
pretty well towards us, ” a Virginia woman wrote early in 1862, "but that
doesn’t prevent our being pretty certain of their intention to stampede
when they get a good chance—I, for one, won’t care one straw—but for the
expense of having to hire 'help. ’ They are nothing but an ungrateful,
discontented lot & I don’t care how soon I get rid of mine.” 38

T The Faithful Slave ”

To endure, perhaps even to survive, many slaves had learned from
experience to anticipate the white man’s moods and whims, to know his
expectations, to placate his fears, to flatter his vanity, and to feed his
feelings of superiority. As a slave, Henry Bibb recalled, he had come to
realize the folly of openly resisting the white man. "The only weapon of self
defence that I could use successfully, was that of deception.” With consider¬
able relish, a former Tennessee slave remembered the death of a particu¬
larly cruel mistress. The slaves on the plantation did what was expected
of them when one of their "white folks” died; they solemnly filed into the
Big House to pay their final respects, covering their faces with their hands
as if to hide their tears and stifle their sobs. Once they were outside,
however, the slaves made their feelings known to each other. "Old God
damn son-of-a-bitch,” one of them murmured, "she gone on down to hell.” 37

During the Civil War, when the master’s temperament often experi¬
enced violent fluctuations, the slave had even more urgent reason to ad¬
here to the time-tested imperatives: that he never appear to be too well
informed, that he remain circumspect in his views, that he mask any
feelings of hostility, that he feign stupidity at the right moment, that he
"act the nigger” when the situation demanded it and punctuate his re¬
sponses to whites with the proper comic mannerisms and facial expressions
—the shuffling of the feet, the scratching of the head, the grin denoting
incomprehension. The black man who invokes the "darky act,” Ralph
Ellison has suggested, is not so much "a 'smart-man-playing-dumb’ as a
weak man who knows the nature of his oppressors’ weakness.... [H]is
mask of meekness conceals the wisdom of one who has learned the secret
of saying the 'yes’ which accomplishes the expressive 'no.’ ” Although some
slaves may well have internalized the ritual of deference, few whites could
know for certain and that was a problem that would plague them through¬
out the war. "Oh, yes, massa!” a Virginia slave responded in 1863 when
asked by a northern clergyman if she had heard of the Emancipation
Proclamation, "we all knows about it; only we darsn’t let on. We pretends
not to know. I said to my ole massa, 'What’s this Massa Lincoln is going
to do to the poor nigger? I hear he is going to cut ’em up awful bad. How
is it, massa?’ I just pretended foolish, sort of.” At the first opportunity, this
slave fled to the Union lines. 38

When questioned about the Civil War, as with any other subject the
slave usually shaped his response to the tone of the question and the
requirements of the occasion. He would tell his white listeners what he
thought they wanted to hear. In the presence of southern whites, the slave
was apt to proclaim his loyalty to the Confederacy (or to his "white folks”
and the state in which he lived) in much the same way that he had denied
on so many occasions (especially to northern visitors) the desire to be free.
"The Yankees will be whipped,” a South Carolina slave recalled assuring
his master and mistress repeatedly, even as he prayed and believed other¬
wise. Whether in the presence of Southerners or Yankees, on the other
hand, the slave might find it more politic to seek refuge in a pretense of

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

ignorance or in evasiveness. "Why, you see, master,” an elderly Louisiana
slave told a Union reporter in 1863, " ’taint for an old nigger like me to
know anything ’bout politics.” When the reporter pressed him to indicate
whether he favored the Confederacy or the Union, the slave maintained his
"ineffable smile” for a moment, and then with a mock gravity replied, "I’m
on de Lord’s side, and Hell work out His salvation; bress de Lord.” Framing
his response with equal care, an elderly Georgia black told a Union officer
who had questioned him about the war, "Well, Sir, what I think about it,
is this—it’s mighty distressin’ this war, but it ’pears to me like the right
thing couldn’t be done without it.” 39

While military fortunes fluctuated with every skirmish and battle, so
did the slaves’ responses to the war, with many of them adopting a "wait
and see” attitude and refusing to commit themselves irretrievably to either
side. In 1862, for example, a correspondent traveling with the Union Army
asked a Missouri slave if he favored the Union. "Oh! yes, massa,” he re¬
plied, "when you’s about we is.” When asked what he would do if the
Confederate troops returned, the slave quickly responded, "[W]e’s good
secesh then. Can’t allow de white folks to git head niggers in dat way.” The
reporter went away impressed with how this slave perceived his role in the
conflict. "These Missouri niggers know a great deal more than the white
folks give them credit for, and whether Missouri goes for the confederacy
or the Union, her slaves have learned a lesson too much to ever be useful
as slaves.... The darkeys understand the whole question and the game
played.” 40

The evasive stance assumed by slaves reflected not only their percep¬
tion of reality but an initial confusion about the war and the issues over
which it was being fought. How much of the war news a master thought
advisable to share with his slaves varied considerably, and in some regions
what one observer called "a stratum of ignorance” prevailed. The Georgia
slave who in November 1864 had still not heard of the Emancipation
Proclamation was by no means unique. "De white folks nebber talk ’fore
black men,” he explained; "dey mighty free from dat.” Even if whites chose
to be candid with their slaves, they were apt to find that anything they
revealed about the war was greeted with suspicion. "I do not speak of the
war to them,” Mary Chesnut noted in November 1861; "on that subject,
they do not believe a word you say.” Perhaps more whites than blacks
ultimately believed the rumors of Yankee atrocities; at least, the direful
warnings voiced by slave owners would have little apparent effect on the
steady stream of blacks to the Union lines. Nor did the master’s confident
talk about the progress of the war necessarily survive slave scrutiny. "I
know pappy say dem Yankees gwine win, ’cause dey alius marchin’ to de
South, but none de South soldiers marches to de North,” William Davis
recalled. "He didn’t say dat to de white folks, but he sho’ say it to us.” 41

When the war began to turn against the Confederacy, even slaves with
limited access to the news could sense it. In some regions, in fact, slavehold¬
ers had their hands full trying to reassure the blacks that the retreating

"The Faithful Slave ”

Confederate soldiers were not, as had been rumored, wantonly murdering
slaves rather than see them freed. But the attempts to communicate with
their slaves on such subjects often became an exercise in futility. "Would
I kill you, or let anybody else kill you?” a South Carolina mistress asked
her butler. He remained apprehensive. "We know you won’t own up to
anything against your side,” he replied. "You never tell us anything that
you can help.” The white woman threw up her hands in exasperation,
concluding that nothing more was to be expected of a slave who had been
"a pampered menial” for twenty years. "His insolence has always been
intolerable.” 42

That slaves should have doubted what their masters and mistresses
told them reflected more than an intuitive skepticism. Despite their rela¬
tive isolation and the prevailing degree of illiteracy, slaves over the years
had devised various methods by which to keep themselves informed, not
only of doings in the household but in the outside world. The servants
enjoyed the most advantageous position, overhearing the conversations of
the white folks while ostensibly preoccupied with their domestic duties,
and then passing the information and gossip along to the slave quarters.
"No, massa, we’se can’t read, but we’se can listen,” a South Carolina slave
explained, after coming over to the Yankees. 43

Within the master’s house, numerous slaves formed their initial im¬
pressions of the war, why it was being fought, and how it might affect their
own lives. Dora Franks, for example, who claimed to have been well treated
in the Mississippi household in which she worked, overheard her master
and mistress discuss the war: "He say he feared all de slaves ’ud be took
away. She say if dat was true she feel lak jumpin’ in de well. I hate to hear
her say dat, but from dat minute I started prayin’ for freedom.” From the
vantage of the house slave, news about the war sometimes consisted of
overhearing angry outbursts and harangues by the whites, punctuated
with wild talk about abolitionists seizing the South, Yankees coming to kill
"us all,” a war "to free the niggers,” and how the Confederates intended
to send "de damn yaller bellied Yankees” reeling back to the North. De¬
spite such bombast, proximity to the conversations of whites usually helped
to clarify the war issues and keep the slaves abreast of the military situa¬
tion. 44

When plantation whites became more guarded in their discussions,
lest they be overheard, the slaves simply became more resourceful. "[T]he
greater the precaution,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, "the
alerter became the slaves, the wider they opened their ears and the more
eager they became for outside information.” Many slaves would take con¬
siderable pride in how they had surreptitiously acquired the war news.
"My father and the other boys,” one recalled, "used to crawl under the
house an’ lie on the ground to hear massa read the newspaper to missis
when they first began to talk about the war.” On the occasion of festivities
in the Big House like a dinner party, another slave recalled, he would climb
into an oak tree, hide under the long moss, and wait until the master and

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

his guests came out on the veranda for an after-dinner smoke. He would
then invariably be treated to a full discussion of the latest war news and
a frank appraisal of the military and political situation. An illiterate wait¬
ing maid experienced the frustration of hearing her master and mistress
spell out certain words they did not want her to hear. This resourceful
woman managed to memorize the letters, "an’ as soon as I got away I ran
to uncle an’ spelled them over to him, an’ he told me what they meant.”
No doubt some masters suspected the diligence with which slaves obtained
news of the war but very few of them were able to adopt the tactic used by
William Henry Trescot, a prominent South Carolinian. He had taken to
sprinkling his conversation with French expressions. "We are using
French ag ains t Africa,” he explained to a perplexed friend. "We know the
black waiters are all ears now, and we want to keep what we have to say
dark. We can’t afford to take them in our confidence, you know.” Mary
Chesnut, for one, found his explanation, also given in French, to be "exas¬
perating.” 45

The local courthouse and post office, favorite meeting places for whites,
were obvious and much-exploited sources of information and rumor. Like
the body servants and conscripted laborers who brought home news from
the front lines, slaves in town on errands for the master found it relatively
easy to acquire information and form impressions about the progress of the
war. The slaves who picked up the mail for their masters became in some
instances couriers to the larger slave community. The post office, Booker
T. Washington recalled, was located about three miles from the plantation,
and the slave who was sent there lingered about long enough to catch the
drift of the conversation of the many whites who gathered there and who
invariably exchanged views about recent developments. On his way home,
the mail carrier would share what he had heard with other slaves, and in
this way, Washington claimed, blacks often heard the news before it
reached the Big House. In Forsyth County, Georgia, young Edward Glenn
fetched the newspaper for his mistress, and each day Walter Raleigh, the
local black preacher, waited for him by the road and read the paper before
the slave took it to the house. On the day Glenn would never forget, the
preacher threw the newspaper on the ground after reading it, hollered "I’m
free as a frog! ” and ran away. The slave dutifully took the paper to his
mistress, who read it and began to cry. "I didn’t say no more,” Glenn
recalled. 46

Although most slaves were illiterate, nearly every neighborhood con¬
tained at least one or more who had acquired reading and writing skills.
Immediately after the war, when freed blacks no longer felt the need to
conceal such matters, many a master would learn to his astonishment
(often during contract negotiations) that a slave he had assumed to be
illiterate had known for some time how to read. While in bondage, however,
some slaves thought it impolitic to reveal such skills. Squires Jackson, a
Florida slave who had kept his literacy from the whites, recalled how the
master walked in upon him unexpectedly while he was reading the newspa-

"The Faithful Slave”

per and demanded to know what he was doing. Equal to the moment,
Jackson immediately turned the newspaper upside down and declared,
"Confederates done won the war.” The master laughed and left the room,
and once again a slave had used the "darky act” to extricate him self from
a precarious situation. 47

Few plantation whites were fully aware of the inventiveness with
which their slaves transmitted information to other blacks. Extensive
black communication networks, feeding on a variety of sources, sped infor¬
mation from plantation to plantation, county to county, often with remark¬
able secrecy and accuracy. What slaves called the "grapevine telegraph”
frequently employed code words that enabled them to carry on conversa¬
tions about forbidden subjects in the very presence of their masters and
mistresses. Although whites often failed to grasp the mechanics or vocabu¬
lary of slave communication, they did come to suspect that their slaves
knew more than they revealed. With the outbreak of the war, slaveholders
tried to curtail interplantation contacts between blacks, lest such fraterni¬
zation—which had been generally tolerated—encourage a wide dissemina¬
tion of news and permit concerted plans for flight to the Union lines.
"When I first heard talk about the War,” Mary Grayson recalled, "the
slaves were allowed to go and see one another sometimes and often they
were sent on errands several miles with a wagon or on a horse, but pretty
soon we were all kept at home, and nobody was allowed to come around and
talk to us.” Despite these restrictions, she added, "we heard what was going
on.” 48

Under wartime conditions, suspicions were more easily aroused and
previously tolerated slave practices came under much closer scrutiny. Not
long after the outbreak of war, for example, a black congregation in Savan¬
nah sang with particular fervor a traditional hymn,

Yes, we all shall be free,

When the Lord shall appear.

While the service was still in progress, local police entered the church,
arrested those in attendance, and charged that the blacks were plotting
freedom, singing "the Lord” instead of "the Yankees” in order to deceive
any white observers in the audience. Even earlier, at the time of Lincoln’s
election, slaves in Georgetown, South Carolina, were whipped for singing
the same song. The black youth who related this incident explained: "Dey
tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees. ” Whether the police overreacted
is less important than the suspicions upon which their actions were based.
Since long before the days of Nat Turner, blacks had been suspected of
using their religious observances to communicate subversive sentiments.
The most innocuous-sounding sermon, the most solemn, traditional hymns,
might conceivably contain double meanings that were obvious only to the

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

black parishioners. When they spoke and sang of delivery from bondage
and oppression, with Old Testament allusions to Moses and the Hebrew
children, the hope clearly lay in this world—"And the God dat lived in
Moses’ time is jus’ de same today.” The whites suspected as much, and
wartime security demanded greater vigilance, including a more rigid en¬
forcement of the statutes that required a white man’s presence at a reli¬
gious service conducted by a black. 49

Whatever the potential risks, whites persisted in seeking comfort and
reassurance in the religious enthusiasm of their slaves and in making it
serve their own ends. During the war, participation of house slaves in the
white family’s devotion and in prayers for the safe return of the master or
his sons helped to reinforce the notion of an extended family bound by
affection, faithfulness, and loyalty. Similarly, white clergymen undertook
the task of admonishing the slaves to be deferential and loyal to their
owners in this time of crisis. Upon visiting the James Davis plantation in
Texas, a white preacher explained the issues to the slaves with unmistak¬
able clarity. "Do you wan’ to keep you homes whar you git all to eat, and
raise your chillen, or do you wan’ to be free to roam roun’ without a home,
like de wil’ animals? If you wan’ to keep you homes you better pray for de
South to win.” At least, that was how William Adams, one of his slave
parishioners, recalled the sermon. When the preacher then asked those
slaves who were willing to pray for the South to raise their hands, everyone
did so. "We was skeered not to,” Adams recalled, "but we sho’ didn’ wan’
de South to win.” 50

Nearly every white preacher faced a problem of credibility when he
addressed the slaves. Not only did they perceive him as an instrument of
the white master, capable of twisting the word of God to make it serve the
white man ’s ends, but what he told them, particularly during the war, had
little relevance for their own lives and hopes. With the prospect of emanci¬
pation looming larger, many slaves seized every opportunity to address God
in their own ways. Charlotte Brooks, a Louisiana slave, bent down between
the rows of sugarcane to pray for her liberation. "I knowed God had
promised to hear his children when they cry, and he heard us way down
here in Egypt.” In Athens, Georgia, Minnie Davis and her mother dutifully
attended the services in the First Presbyterian Church, where the slaves
sat in the gallery and listened to the white preacher implore the Lord to
drive the Yankees back to the North. "My mother said that all the time
he was praying out loud like that, she was praying to herself: 'Oh, Lord,
please send the Yankees on and let them set us free.’ ” 51

Occupying a delicate position in the slave world, the black preacher
and the black plantation exhorter might find themselves forced into com¬
promises and duplicity in order to survive. If whites were present at the
services, as the law so often commanded, the preacher or exhorter would
have to be doubly cautious about what he told the blacks. The Civil War
placed him in a particular dilemma, caught between increased white vigi¬
lance and the urge to articulate the uppermost thoughts of his parishion-

"The Faithful Slave"

ers. His attempts to resolve that conflict severely tested his powers of
obfuscation. On the day of fasting and prayer ordered by President Jeffer¬
son Davis after a series of Confederate military reverses, whites and slaves
gathered at the old Guinea Church in Cumberland County, Virginia. After
the whites had said their prayers, seeking to turn the tide of battle, the
time came for the blacks to make known their sentiments. The first black
speaker, an old deacon, avoided the issue altogether with the simple prayer
that "the Lord’s will be done,” which the parishioners could obviously
interpret as they wished. But Armstead Berkeley, the pastor of the black
Baptist church, when called upon to lead a prayer, pleaded with the Lord
to "point the bullets of the old Confederate guns right straight at the hearts
of the Yankees; make our men victorious on the battlefield and send them
home in health and strength to join their people in peace and prosperity.”
That seemed clear enough; the black church deacons, in fact, were said to
have reproached the pastor after the meeting for this apparent betrayal of
the slaves’ cause. "Don’t worry, children,” the pastor explained, "the Lord
knew what I was talking about.” The deacons were reportedly satisfied
with the pastor’s explanation. With a far clearer sense of purpose, an old
plantation preacher in South Carolina complied with a request to pray for
the Confederacy: "Bress, we do pray Thee, our enemies, de wicked Sesech.
Gib dem time to ’pent, we do pray Thee, and den we will excuse Thee if
Thou takes dem all to glory.” 52

Although forced at times to play a dual role, the black preacher usually
commanded a leading place in the black community. Many former slaves
recalled him as a man who had offered them hope for redemption and
freedom in this world, even when the prospects seemed most dim. L. J.
Coppin, who would later become a prominent cleric in the African Method¬
ist Episcopal Church, remembered with particular admiration Christopher
Jones, a Maryland black upon whom the slaves had come to rely not only
for religious guidance and inspiration but for his knowledge of wartime
developments. "He was not so much for resorting to the prophecies of
Daniel for information,” Coppin remarked, "as he was to the newspaper
that secretly came weekly to him.” Many of the whites with whom William
Russell spoke, in his tour of the South in 1861, understood the power of the
black preacher as well as his capacity for mischief. "They 'do the niggers
no good,’ ” he was told, " 'they talk about things that are going on else¬
where, and get their minds unsettled.’ ” Some whites in the Ogeechee
District of Georgia were themselves so unsettled by a slave preacher who
proclaimed the inevitability of a Yankee victory that they covered him
with tar and set him afire. 53

No matter how closely the master regulated the religious observances
of his slaves, he could neither control every aspect of their lives nor filter
the information and rumors that eventually reached the slave quarters.
When asked if the masters knew anything of "the secret life of the colored
people,” Robert Smalls, a former South Carolina slave, would later testify:
"No, sir; one life they show their masters and another life they don’t show.”

BEEN IN THE STOEM SO LONG

On the larger farms and plantations, where more than half the slaves lived,
the social life of the quarters brought together house servants and field
hands, artisans and carriage drivers, stableboys and cooks. The news gath¬
ered in the Big House that day or in the nearby town or from slaves on a
neighboring plantation would be divulged and discussed, often with asides
and stories at the expense of the master and mistress. Dilly Yellady’s
parents, who had been slaves in North Carolina, told her how "de niggers
would git in de slave quarters at night an’ pray fer freedom an’ laf ’bout
what de Yankees wus doin’, ’bout Lincoln an’ Grant foolin’ deir marsters
so.” 54

To attain a greater degree of privacy, the slaves might assemble "down
in the hollow” or in the "hush-harbors,” secluded meeting spots away from
the Big House where the slaves would employ various devices to absorb the
sounds. What transpired at such gatherings appears to have been a mix¬
ture of prayer, singing, and candid discussions (often whispered) about
subjects that had to be repressed in the presence of the whites. On some
plantations, it provided slaves with an opportunity to relieve themselves
of the tensions and physical exhaustion that had accumulated over a long
day and evening of hard labor. During the war, these gatherings took on
even greater importance, serving not only to allow personal release and
expression but also to convey and discuss the most recent news about the
military situation, the proximity of Union troops, the prospect of emanci¬
pation, and the master’s intentions. Traveling in the interior of Virginia,
an "unobserved spectator” who happened upon such a gathering heard
them pray for the success of the North, and one old woman wept for joy
when told that the Yankees were soon coming to set them free. "Oh! good
massa Jesus,” she shouted, "let the time be short.” After the white
preacher on the Davis plantation in Texas led the slaves in prayers for the
Confederacy, he left apparently confident of their faithfulness. That night,
however, the slaves met secretly "down in de hollow” and Uncle Mack
entertained them with a story.

One time over in Virginny dere was two ole niggers. Uncle Bob and Uncle
Tom. Dey was mad at one ’nuther and one day dey decided to have a
dinner and bury de hatchet. So dey sat down, and when Uncle Bob wasn’t
lookin’ Uncle Tom put some poison in Uncle Bob’s food, but he saw it and
when Uncle Tom wasn’t lookin’, Uncle Bob he turned de tray roun’ on
Uncle Tom, and he gits de poison food.

Looking out at the assembled group, Uncle Mack concluded: "Dat’s what
we slaves is gwine do, jus’ turn de tray roun’ and pray for de North to
win.” 55

When the wartime experience began to reveal a diversity of slave
response and behavior, whites were sometimes too incredulous to concede
that they might have overextended themselves in the praise and confidence
they had earlier lavished upon "the faithful slave.” Victims of their own
self-assurances, they seemed incapable of dealing with reality, refusing to
believe that their slaves understood the implications of the war. "The truth

"The Faithful Slave”

is,” Henry W. Ravenel of South Carolina insisted to the very end, "the
negroes know but little of the cause & issues of the war.” That assumption
would enable Ravenel to blame the Yankee invaders for turning the heads
of the blacks, leading them into acts of mischief and betrayal. But the
impact of the war was simply too pervasive, and the sources of information
too plentiful, to have kept the slaves in total ignorance of its meaning. As
early as the election of 1860, in fact, several white observers had noted how
slaves were "the most interested and eager listeners” at political gather¬
ings, and numerous blacks recalled how their own masters had voiced fears
that the election of Abraham Lincoln would doom slavery. 56

Although slaves were reticent about openly revealing their feelings,
they found it increasingly difficult to mask them. Even as their muscles
remained faithful to the master, raising the crops that were both indispens¬
able for the war effort and necessary for survival in the quarters, their
faces and sometimes their words and actions threatened to betray their
inner thoughts, particularly when the prospect of emancipation became
clearer and the outcome of the war more predictable. The slaves appeared
to sense when that turning point had been reached. "Damn the niggers,”
a Louisiana planter exclaimed, "they know more about politics than most
of the white men. They know everything that happens.” To a newspaper
editor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the progress of the war could be dis¬
cerned by simply watching the faces of the local blacks: "The spirits of the
colored citizens rise and fall with the ebb and flow of this tide of blue devils,
and when they are glad as larks, the whites are depressed and go about the
streets like mourners.” 57

Based upon the information they had pieced together from various
sources, slaves not only kept themselves informed of the progress of the war
but, more critically, they began to appreciate its implications for their own
lives and future. By 1863, at least, the assumption prevailed among vast
numbers of slaves (including even those who did not entirely welcome the
prospect) that if the Union Army prevailed on the battlefields, the Confed¬
eracy and slavery would expire together. They appeared to understand, a
Union officer reported, "that it was a war for their liberation; that the
cause of the war was their being in slavery, and that the aim and result
would be their freedom. Further than that they did not seem to have any
idea of it.” 58

But that was more than enough to force the white South to consider
the most expeditious means by which to maintain its internal security and
calm the growing apprehension of its people.

Never had the slaveholding class permitted verbal expressions of faith in
their blacks to blind them to the need for the utmost vigilance in control¬
ling their movements and behavior. In the face of wartime disruptions,

been in the storm so long

such vigilance became all the more imperative, if only to make certain that
the loudly voiced self-assurances were neither misplaced nor betrayed.
Although the Confederate Congress, like many states, initially exempted
from military service one white man for every twenty slaves he supervised,
the protest of less favored planters and farmers forced a sharp reduction
in such exemptions, thereby shifting much of the burden of wartime sur¬
veillance to the citizens’ patrols. Based on their previous experience with
these patrols, few if any blacks had any reason to welcome this develop-
ment.

Made up largely of nonslaveholding whites, many of them eager to
vent their own grievances and frustrations on the blacks, the patrols had
traditionally undertaken the responsibility for slave control outside the
plantations. Aside from checking out rumors of insurrectionary plots, they
seized runaways, broke up clandestine slave gatherings, and meted out
punishment to blacks found off the plantations without a proper pass.
Wherever the patrols operated, even if on an irregular basis, the slaves had
come to fear t hem as legal terrorists who went out of their way to inflict
brutalities and humiliation on any black people they encountered. With
the outbreak of the war, state and local governments, recognizing the need
to maximize police surveillance, moved to strengthen the patrols and to
expand their operations. But these attempts came at precisely the moment
army service depleted the number of eligible males, including many who
had previously performed patrol duty. And as the prospect of controlling
b l ack s sensing liberation diminished, the alarm of local white residents
mounted. "I am afraid we will have troublesome times down here,” a
Louisiana woman wrote her husband. "[T]he men are patroleing [sic] all
the time but the men are so few in the county that they can not do much
good.” 58

Confronted with the actuality of a Yankee invasion and anxieties
about the black response, white Southerners found themselves in an impos¬
sible situation. When the governor of Mississippi, for example, ordered the
enlistment of still more men to resist the Yankees, he encountered a storm
of protest from whites who gave every indication of fearing the slaves as
much as the Union Army. An officer in the state militia privately warned
the governor of the concern voiced by many of his soldiers: "the question
is constantly asked 'what is to become of my wife & children when left in
a land swarming with negroes without a single white man on many planta¬
tions to restrain their licentiousness by a little wholesome fear?’ ” The
answer came soon enough, as letters poured in on the governor describing
the virtual collapse of slave discipline and subordination in several coun¬
ties. "If there is any more men taken out of this county,” one resident
warned, "we may as well give it to the negroes ... now we have to patrole
every night to keep them down.” Such expressions of concern, coupled with
demands that Confederate troops be placed in positions where they might
most effectively combat epidemics of slave insubordination, multiplied as
the Union Army (and the prospect of slave liberation) drew closer. 80

"The Faithful Slave”

Apprehension mounted, too, over the behavior and loyalty of slaves in
the cities and towns. The objects of particular suspicion were those blacks
permitted to hire out their time (with the owner receiving a specified rental
payment), many of whom lived away from the premises of both the owner
and the immediate supervisor and thereby acquired a degree of autonomy
denied the rural slave. That autonomy, to believe the complaints of numer¬
ous white residents, had produced a dangerous class of people capable of
undermining the entire system of racial control and discipline. After the
outbreak of war, many planters heeded admonitions to withdraw their
slaves from the contaminating influences of urban life; at the same time,
newly strengthened state laws and local ordinances were designed to re¬
strict the movement of black residents. Nevertheless, urban slaves capital¬
ized on the shortage of policemen. Reports of theft, arson, and assault
periodically revived fears of servile insurrection, and white residents were
forced to alter old notions about the security of their homes. "There was
a time,” a Florida newspaper reminded its white readers, "when a man
might go to sleep and leave his house open with impunity in this city, but
we fear that time has passed away.” Although still boasting that he never
locked the apartment in which he slept, Edmund Ruffin confided to his
diary that he had begun "to use means for defence which I never did before,
in keeping loaded guns by my bedside.” 61

Despite the conspicuous efforts made by some free Negroes to allay
white suspicions, the tensions created by the war eroded their legal position
and subjected their daily lives to even closer scrutiny. To minimize the
danger posed by this population, local and state authorities prepared to
enforce the laws barring their entry into the state and prohibiting manu¬
mission by last will and testament; they also ordered free black residents
to register and be properly licensed by county officials and threatened to
remove any who exercised an "improper or mischievous influence upon
slaves.” The ultimate solution, adopted by several states, was to encourage
free blacks to select a master and voluntarily enter into slavery. After all,
a Savannah newspaper observed, "every day we hear our slaves pro¬
nounced the happiest people in the world. Why then this lamentation over
putting the free negro in his only proper... condition?” Enforcement of the
newly strengthened restrictions on free blacks varied considerably; never¬
theless, the control machinery was readily available for those who wished
to use it, whether for purposes of harassment or expulsion. And free blacks
who might have entertained other notions had now been forcibly reminded
that their position in southern society was analogous to that of the slave
rather than the white man. 62

Although legislation and patrol vigilance might check certain abuses,
the swift punishment of troublesome blacks had always been thought to
have a more immediate and enduring impact. The exigencies of war made
it all the more urgent to maintain that "subjection through fear” long
sanctioned by white public opinion and courts. If loyalty and subjugation
could be exacted in no other way, plantation whites freely wielded the

been in the stoem so long

whip. Any violent altercation between a white person and a slave required
no investigation of cause before meting out the appropriate punishment.
"Jacob has had to fight with one of Mrs. Pickets Negroes,” a Louisiana
woman reported in May 1862, "and the Negro cut him seven times on the
head and face. Jake gave him one hundred lashes for evry cut an fifty for
the ballance of his misconduct.” If only to preserve the prerogatives of the
master class, some whites cautioned against summary justice meted out by
a mob, but the overriding concern for internal security took its inevitable
toll. Angry mobs did not hesitate to hang blacks accused of collaborating
with the enemy, nor did they scruple about employing more brutal forms

of punishment. 63 .

Neither extraordinary legislative measures nor increased vigilance
proved adequate to the impossible task of wartime slave control, and even
the swift and summary punishment of recalcitrant workers hardly allayed
growing apprehension over the behavior of the blacks. In some instances,
the subjugation achieved by the use of the whip must have seemed less than
satisfying to those inflicting the beating. In Nansemond County, Virginia,
a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud
for the Yankees. The master’s two sons ordered him to kneel in the barn¬
yard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed even
louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even
bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the
slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died.
The "triumph” achieved by these two young white men sounded more like
the death knell of the system they sought so desperately to maintain. 64

Deprived of what they deemed essential protection, often frustrated in
tfrpir attempts to anticipate black behavior, many anguished whites forgot
all that talk about contented and loyal slaves and described a situation
fraught with the most terrifying implications. Having heard that the home
guard might soon be recalled to combat the Yankee invaders, the mistress
of a plantation in the Abbeville district of South Carolina wondered how
the remaining whites could possibly survive the internal enemy. "If the
men are going, then awful things are coming, and I don’t want to stay. My
God, the women and children, it will be murder and ruin. There are many
among the black people and they only want a chance.” 6 * If any additional
evidence were needed, the obsession with internal security and, perhaps
most ominous, the deployment in some regions of Confederate troops to
resist both Yankee invaders and rebellious blacks suggested a white South
desperately clinging to the fiction of the docile slave without in any way
believing it.

Refusing to resign themselves to the grim prospects of occupation and
emancipation, numerous white families chose to remove their slaves to

"The Faithful Slave”

safer grounds. That was an abrupt change in his life that Allen V. Manning
would never forget. Leaving the old plantation in Clarke County, Missis¬
sippi, Manning and his fellow slaves found themselves heading westward
into a country they knew but little about. Several times the caravan halted
in some place, while the master hired them out to planters trying to make
a crop. Every time the Yankees came closer, he would move them out again
until finally they crossed the Sabine River into Texas. That was where
Manning’s sister gave birth, and the master promptly named the new girl
Texana. When they reached Coryell County, the master decided to settle
and plant a crop, satisfied that the Yankees no longer posed an immediate
threat to his slave property. And it was here, more than 600 miles from the
plantation where he had spent most of his bondage, that Allen Manning
would learn one day of his freedom. He never returned to Mississippi. 66

The decision made by Allen Manning’s master to run his slaves into
Texas reflected the desperation with which numbers of planters sought to
avoid the panic that often preceded the arrival of the Yankees and to find
a place where they might keep their slave force intact and postpone for as
long as possible the need to emancipate them. From the very outset of the
war, some planter families anticipated the need for such a refuge and
rented or purchased places to which they could move themselves and their
slave property at the appropriate time. The first slaves to be relocated were
often the most troublesome, those who were thought to have a demoraliz¬
ing influence on the others and in whom the least amount of confidence
could be placed. Louis Manigault, a Georgia rice planter, acting on the
advice of his overseer, selected ten slaves he deemed "most likely would
cause trouble” and dispatched them to an area "sufficiently remote from
all excitement.” A planter friend of Mary Chesnut searched for "a place of
safety” to send 200 of his blacks who "had grown to be a nuisance,” while
still another South Carolinian, supervising the removal of his mother’s
slaves, chose "the primest hands & the most uncertain.” 67

Whether because of the threatened disruption of local and family ties
or the proximity to freedom, few slaves relished the idea of being removed
from the home farm or plantation. Sensing that reluctance, a Tennessee
planter tried to ease the pain by sharing the remaining whiskey with his
slaves before ordering their departure. Perhaps he had only intended to
numb their senses; nevertheless, the act revealed a certain compassion,
when compared to the owners who employed various deceptions to prepare
their slaves for the arduous trek, telling them about the murderous Yan¬
kees and, as one slave recalled, "dat where dey is goin’ de lakes full of syrup
and covered with batter cakes, and dey won’t have to work so hard.” Rather
than resort to such ruses, the proprietress of a plantation in central
Georgia appealed to the faithfulness of her slaves and made removal a
virtual test of their loyalty. "I reminded them of their master’s absence;
how he had committed his wife and children to their care; how desirous was
I to be able to tell him on his return that they deserved his confidence to
the last.” All but two of the slaves left with her the next morning. 68

been in the storm so long

Whatever their owners told them, the slaves seemed to know instinc-
tively (if not from the "grapevine”) why they were being sent away, and for
some that proved to be sufficient reason to take immediate action to deter¬
mine their own destinations. Stephen Jordon, who had been a slave in
Louisiana, regarded his master as "a good man” but with a highly volatile
temper. When slaves in the neighborhood ran off to Union-occupied New
Orleans, however, he assured his master that he had no such intention.
"I shall never leave you. Those Yankees are too bad, I hear.” But when
his master announced plans to remove all the slaves to Texas, Jordon
had to reconcile his sense of obligation with his deep yearning for free¬
dom.

Of course I liked Mr. Valsin well enough, but I rather be free than be with
him, or be the slave of any body else. So his word about going to Texas
rather sunk deep into me, because I was praying for the Yankees to come
up our way just as soon as possible. I dreaded going to Texas, because I
feared that I would never get free. The same thought was in the mind of
every one of the slaves on our place. So two nights before we were to leave
for Texas all the slaves on our place had a secret meeting at midnight,
when we decided to leave to meet the Yankees. Sure enough, about one
o’clock that night every one of us took through the woods to make for the
Union line.

In low-country South Carolina, a planter made the mistake of telling his
slaves that he intended to move them into the interior after the crop had
been completed; seventy-six of them left the night of his announcement and
reached the Union lines. The steady movement of Louisiana planters into
Texas and Arkansas was to have included the slaves belonging to John
Williams of Assumption Parish; the morning of his intended departure,
however, he awakened to discover that twenty-seven of them, including
several of the family favorites, were nowhere to be found. "Will you ever
have faith in one again?” his daughter thought to ask him. No matter how
hard the planter tried to conceal his intentions, the information managed
to reach the slave quarters. Only two days after making some discreet
inquiries in town about a plantation to rent, John Berkley Grimball, a
prominent South Carolina planter, learned that nearly every one of his
slaves, including "the best of them,” had disappeared during the previous
night—"about 80 of them ... men women and children.” He quickly
confined most of the remaining slaves to the workhouse in the nearby town
until he found another place in the up-country. "This is a terrible blow and
has probably ruined me,” he sighed after adding up his losses. 69

The wagon trains carrying the planter families and household goods,
with the slaves, cattle, and horses trailing behind them, would become a
familiar sight in parts of the wartime South. The fall of New Orleans and
exposure to Federal raiding parties precipitated the largest exodus, with
more than 150,000 slaves sent out of Louisiana and Mississippi, choking the

"The Faithful Slave” 33

roads and towns leading into Texas. "It look like everybody in the world
was going to Texas,” Allen Manning recalled. "When we would be going
down the road we would have to walk along the side all the time to let the
wagons go past, all loaded with folks going to Texas.” The slaves who made
these treks would long recall the crowded roads, the inhospitable towns,
the mothers toting the children on their backs, the fathers tending the
wagons and livestock, and the many difficult detours that were ordered to
avoid Yankee raiding parties. "Dat was de awfullest trip any man ever
make!” Charley Williams, a former Louisiana slave, recalled. "We had to
hide from everybody until we find out if dey Yankees or Sesesh, and we go
along little old back roads and up one mountain and down another, through
de woods all de way.” Virginia Newman remembered how "us all walk
barefeets and our feets break and run they so sore, and blister for months.
It cold and hot sometime and rain and us got no house or no tent. To
compensate for the drudgery of the journey, the slaves invented some
appropriate songs and sang them to the slow steps of the oxen pulling the
wagons.

Walk, walk, you nigger, walk!

De road am dusty, de road am tough,
Dust in de eye, dust in de tuft;

Dust in de mouth, yous can't talk —
Walk, you niggers, don't you balk.

Walk, walk, you nigger, walk!

De road am dusty, de road am rough.
Walk 'til we reach dere, walk or bust —
De road am long, we be dere by and by.

"We’uns don’t sing it many times,” Bill Homer remembered," ’til de missy
come and sit in de back of de wagon, facin’ we’uns [who were walking], and
she begin to beat de slow time and sing wid we’uns. Dat please Missy Mary

to sing with us and she laugh and laugh.” 70 .

Although many of the elderly slaves had been left behmd on the old
plantations, relocation would take its toll in exhaustion, disrupted families,
and lives. After two years on the road, the Miles family of Richmond,
Virginia, finally reached Franklin, Texas, but not before the master had
sold and traded both slaves and livestock along the way, retaining only his
personal servants. Elvira Boles, who had been a slave in Mississippi, left
her baby buried "somewhere on dat road” to Texas. Louis Love of Louisiana
recalled the death of his brother before they reached the Trinity River. A
North Carolina planter, who "didn’ want to part with his niggers, fail©
to survive the trip to Arkansas, as did three of the slaves. "We buried the
slaves there [on the road],” Millie Evans remembered, "but we camped
while ol’ master was carried back to North Carolina. When ol mistress
come back we started on to Arkansas an’ reached here safe but when we
got here we foun’ freedom here too.” 71

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Whether on the road or in the makeshift camps at night, the slaves had
ample time to reflect over their situation—the places they had left behind,
the breakup of families, the growing distance between themselves and the
nearest Union troops, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. Their brooding
boded only disastrous results for some slaveholders. Rarely a morning
passed without the discovery that still more slaves had fled during the
night, perhaps to the Union lines, perhaps even back to the old plantation.
The difficulty in controlling their slaves on the road forced some owners to
turn back; others simply tried to minimize their losses. With her husband
in the Confederate Army, Mary Williams Pugh of Louisiana decided to
attach her slaves to those of her parents, and the two families then set out
for a month-long trip to Rusk, Texas. The morning they departed, her
parents lost twenty-seven slaves. "The first night we camped Sylvester left

_the next night at Bayou B. about 25 of Pa’s best hands left & the next

day at Berwick Bay nearly all of the women & children started—but this
Pa found out in time to catch them all except one man & one woman.
Altogether he had lost about sixty of his best men.” Meanwhile, Mary
Pugh’s brother had encountered similar losses the first two days on the
road and he decided to turn back, "as he was afraid of being left with only
women & children.” After these experiences, Mrs. Pugh could only be
grateful for the "good behavior” of her own slaves. "[Y]ou have every
reason to be proud of them,” she wrote her husband, "as I have told them
you would be. They are the talk of every neighborhood they pass through
as they are such exceptions to other negroes.” 72

The decision to move the slaves, made in the interest of preserving the
work force, could thus prove to be costly, and there appeared to be no way
to predict accurately how the relocated blacks would respond. When two
white men engaged in moving blacks from the South Carolina coast to the
up-country made the mistake of laying down their weapons and going to
sleep, the slaves seized the guns, shot and killed their escorts, and made off
to the Yankees. Still further difficulties awaited masters at the end of these
treks, when their slaves discovered something less than the land of milk
and honey and the lakes filled with syrup they had been told to expect.
Upon arriving in Texas, Van Moore recalled, a fellow slave tasted the water
from a lake and spit it out in disgust. "I reckon he thinks dat funny syrup.”
If work routines differed from what they had known on the old place, they
were not necessarily less arduous. Many owners, in order to sustain them¬
selves, hired out their slaves by the day, week, and month to work in
whatever jobs might be available. At the same time, some slaves who had
been accustomed to specialized tasks now found themselves little more
than common field hands. Bill Homer, for example, had been a coachman
on the plantation in Shreveport, Louisiana, but in Caldwell, Texas, he
became an ox driver and hoer. 73

Rather than finding any relief from the customary problems of man¬
agement and discipline, slaveholders were apt to discover that the new
environment encouraged greater independence in the slaves. Even owners

"The Faithful Slave”

who removed their blacks only a short distance encountered unexpected
problems. F. D. Richardson, a Louisiana planter, had moved the bulk of his
work force from the Bayside plantation down a bayou and into the woods,
in the hope that this more secluded spot would protect them from the
Yankees; there he cleared some land, constructed a house and slave cabins,
and hired an overseer. Four months later, his slaves pillaged the new place
and fled; he subsequently located forty-five of them in nearby Opelousas,
"together with six mule carts, two ox carts, one four horse wagon, twenty
eight mules, eight yoke of oxen—mares & colts & saddle & buggy horses
not to be found. This property I have lost and never expect to see it
again.” 74

After assessing the various options open to him, John Berkeley Grim-
ball found little reason to be optimistic. "To move or to stay seems to be
equally ruinous to my prospects,” he wrote in late February 1862. To
compensate himself for the eighty slaves who had fled before he could move
them, he sold nearly all his remaining slaves, retaining only the house
servants and a few elderly blacks who would look after the old plantation.
Like Grimball, a small minority of slave owners, rather than risk the perils
of relocation or emancipation, turned to sale as a preferable if not al¬
together profitable alternative; perhaps as many, while retaining the bulk
of their slave force, chose to rid themselves of the security risks, those who
had already proven troublesome or whose past conduct raised questions
about their dependability in a crisis. Louis Manigault of Georgia had no
hesitation in selling a slave he considered "a most dangerous character &
bad example to the others.” Of the ten slaves belonging to a Missouri
couple, only one had given them grounds for concern: "He used to wait in
the house and was a likely boy and very smart. Well he must needs have
his freedom—it was two years ago—so he bought a knuckleduster and was
for Trilling my husband; but we found it out and sold him right off. We only
got $700 for him, though.” In the absence of any overt act, wartime tensions
still had a way of magnifying suspicions. "Sell Tom,” a Florida woman
advised her husband about his personal slave, "I am not happy with the
thoughts of your being alone with him.... He will never abandon the hope
of freedom, and if your life should stand in his way, you are not safe....
I would not have you between him and freedom for the wealth of the world.
Tom must go out of our household.” 75

The wartime trade in slaves did not always suggest doubts about the
future of the institution. In areas where the restricted acreage devoted to
cotton, along with the concentration of relocated planters and their slaves,
produced a surplus of slave laborers, purchasers were available to capital¬
ize on good bargains. The market value of slaves remained relatively high,
compared with prewar rates, but the prices paid for slaves reflected the
rapid rate of inflation, the depreciated Confederate currency, and the mili¬
tary fortunes of the Confederacy; the slaves sold in Richmond in early 1865
for $10,000, for example, represented a real (gold) value of not more than
$100. The capacity for self-deception proved limitless for those whites who

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

chose to interpret the high prices as demonstrating confidence m the ulti¬
mate triumph of the Confederacy or as a firm rejection of the legality of
L^coln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Most slavehdders, however re¬
tained a sufficient business and political sense to knowbetter. In D^ember
1864 with the outcome of the war nearly decided, Edmund Ruffin, the
staunchest Confederate patriot of them all, sold fifteen of his slaves, mostly
women and children. His son made no attempt to conceal the rea f°ns.
"these were all consumers and likely to be for some time and were sold on
account of the expense of keeping and the doubtful tenure of the prop-

^ When confidence in the survival of the Confederacy faltered some
slaveholders abandoned any patriotic or paternalistic pretenses andmade
a final, desperate effort to unload their slaves. Us was sol d ondebloc
Wash Wilson recalled,"’cause Marse Tom say he gwine git dlhe donepuA
in us out us, iffen he can ’fore de Yanks take dis country. Shortly before
the of Petersburg, Virginia, began, Fannie Berry remembered,

"dey were felling niggers for little nothin’ hardly,” and as March

1 1865, Mary Chesnut noted the "sale” of two slaves m besieged Richmond,
a black woman traded for yarn, and a black man sold for a keg of nail .
Although most slaveholders chose not to dispose of their proper y
manner, they were hardly indifferent to the pecumary consequences of
emancipation. With an eye to the future, masters prepared for 1the Yankees
by a P rice to each of their slaves. If they could not retain them after

the war, they would at least be in a position to claim compensation for their
losses. 77

The conditions created by wartime dangers and necessities had few
precedents in southern life or in the long history of slavery. If numerous
frisks were removed to safe havens to keep them from the Yankees, sti
others were impressed into service as military laborers to help repel the
Yankee invaders or kept in the fields to grow the crops necessary to feed
the Army. Forced to muster every resource at its command, the white
South would find itself in the position of debating the increased use of
blacks in the military effort, even as fears mounted that blacks might, it
given the opportunity, seek to undermine that effort. For the blacks, the
situation and the choices were no less paradoxical, as they found them¬
selves called upon to help sustain a war effort which, if successful, would
perpetuate their bondage.

Appreciating the critical role of blacks in the economy, the white
South, at the very outset of the war, pronounced slavery "a tower of
strength” that would assure the ultimate triumph of independence. With
enslaved workers providing the necessary labor at home, larger numbers

"The Faithful Slave”

of whites would be available for military service, thereby giving the slave
South a decided advantage over the North. "The institution of slavery in
the South/’ a Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper boasted, "alone enables
her to place in the field a force so much larger in proportion to her white
population than the North, or indeed than any country which is dependent
entirely on free labor.” Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist,
conceded as much when he called the black laborer "the key of the situa¬
tion—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns. Without the im¬
mense human resources made available by slavery, he thought it unlikely
that the Confederacy could sustain any prolonged military effort. "Arrest
that hoe in the hands of the negro,” Douglass advised early in the war, "and
you smite rebellion in the very seat of its life.” 78

Not only did slaves constitute the mainstay of the agricultural econ¬
omy—"the very stomach of this rebellion,” said Douglass but their ser¬
vices as military laborers more than justified the Union Army s belated
decision to treat runaway slaves as "contraband of war.” In the Confeder¬
ate Army, slaves worked as cooks, teamsters, hospital attendants, musi¬
cians, and body servants; elsewhere, slaves were employed in a variety of
skilled trades essential to the war effort. They labored in railroad construc¬
tion and maintenance, in the extraction of raw materials, in the erection
of fortifications, and in the manufacture of weapons of war. More than half
the workers at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond were blacks, as were
nearly three fourths of the employees in the naval ordnance plant at
Selma, Alabama. 79

Early in the war, when patriotism was at its peak, numerous slave¬
holders volunteered their blacks without wages (the government furnish¬
ing quarters and rations) or contracted (hired) them out to military
authorities; at the same time, some free blacks sought to establish their
loyalty by offering their services to strengthen defensive works around the
cities and towns. When volunteers failed to meet increasing military needs,
the Confederate government authorized the impressment of slaves and
agreed to compensate the owners (thirty dollars a month and the full
value of the slave in case of his death). The new law quickly fell victim
to the growing conflict between state and Confederate authorities and
failed to supply the necessary laborers. With somewhat greater success,
local authorities and military commanders met emergency situations
by arbitrarily mobilizing the available black laborers—free and slave
alike—i n a threatened region and forcing them into service. That was the
fate of many blacks in Richmond, for example, as Union troops neared
the city.

The negroes were taken unaware on the street, at the market, from the
shops, and at every point where they were found doing errands for them¬
selves or their masters and mistresses.... In some cases the impressment
agents acted with considerable indiscretion, snatching the negro from
the marketing of his master, and leaving the marketing to take care of

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

itself; taking the negro from his perch on the cart and leaving the cart

driverless behind . 80

The growing reluctance of planters to part with their slaves, even to
sustain a war for the preservation of that property, compounded the prob¬
lem of meeting military labor requisitions. "Have you ever noticed the
strange conduct of our people during this war? a Confederate congress¬
man from Georgia asked. "They give up their sons, husbands, brothers &
friends, and often without murmuring, to the army; but let one of their
negroes be taken, and what a howl you will hear.” Still another legislator
claimed to know a planter with five sons in the Army who resisted attempts
to impress his slaves. "The patriotic planters,” he observed, would will¬
ingly put their own flesh and blood into the army, but when you asked them
for a negro the matter approached the point of drawing an eye-tooth.” 81
Neither waning patriotism nor constitutional scruples explain altogether
the resistance of slaveholders to impressment. Although many did protest
it as an interference with individual rights and property, the principal
objections reflected a fear of pecuniary loss and the consequences of losing
control over their slaves. Not only were slave laborers frequently im¬
pressed at a crucial time in plantation operations but the work patterns,
rigors, and demands of military labor tended to injure their health, some¬
times demoralized them, and all too often rendered them almost useless—
if not downright dangerous—upon their return to the plantation.

Except for sale or removal, few wartime disruptions imposed greater
hardships on the slaves than impressment. Made available to military
authorities for a specified period of time, such slaves were invariably over¬
worked, underfed, poorly clothed, brutally treated, exposed to enemy
gunfire, and given inadequate medical attention. The deplorable condition
and neglect of hospitalized slave military laborers in Richmond, for exam¬
ple, moved a local newspaper to denounce their treatment as "a disgrace
to humanity.” Letters poured in on the governor of Virginia from owners
requesting that they be compensated for the slaves who had been laboring
on fortifications and were lost because of disease, accident, exposure, and
neglect. Ordered by local authorities to provide four blacks for the defense
of Vicksburg, a Mississippi slaveholder noted their fate in his diary: "They
were sent and put into the water up to the breast in the swamp below
Vicksburg chop[p]ing trees the Consequence we have lost one by death
the others are still ill one kept over there & got sick & we had to send a
waggon & bed to bring him home.” 82

Even if slaves survived the physical ordeal of military labor, owners
expressed concern about their state of mind and the unwholesome moral
influences to which they might have been subjected. The information and
ideas such slaves imbibed would be transmitted to the other slaves and
threatened to undermine proper discipline and control. Nor could slave
owners be certain that their impressed blacks would choose to return to the
plantation. Proximity to Union lines afforded military laborers numerous

"The Faithful Slave”

opportunities for escape. The fact that some owners dispatched their trou¬
blemakers—the least intimidated slaves—made this all the more likely,
but even the most carefully selected slaves found the prospect of freedom
difficult to resist. 83

Rather than flee to the Yankees, some impressed blacks who managed
to escape headed for their homes. If they succeeded, they might then plead
with their masters not to send them back to the fortifications, and some
owners readily sympathized with such pleas. "[T]hey might kill him if they
wanted to,” a North Carolina slave told his master, "but... he would never
go back to that work.” Numerous slaves shared that aversion to military
duty and did what they could to avoid it, often with the connivance of their
masters. But for the many who served and survived, it proved to be an
indelible experience.

Dat was de worst times dat dis here nigger ever seen an’ de way dem
white men drive us niggers, it was something awful. De strap, it was goin’
from ’fore day till ’way after night. De niggers, heaps of ’em just fall in
dey tracks give out an’ them white men layin’ de strap on dey backs
without ceasin’. Dat was zackly way it was wid dem niggers like me what
was in de army work. I had to stand it, Boss, till de War was over . 84

How a slave reacted to military labor depended to some degree on the kind
of bondage he had known at home. Jacob Stroyer, for example, who had
been raised on a plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, claimed to
have "fared better” on the fortifications than on the plantation. He appre¬
ciated the spare time he had (in which he continued his quest for literacy),
and he viewed the entire experience as a welcome diversion from the
plantation routines. At the same time, he acknowledged the contradictions
inherent in his role as a Confederate laborer:

[Although we knew that our work in the Confederate service was against
our liberty, yet we were delighted to be in military service. We felt an
exalted pride that, having spent a little time at these war points, we had
gained some knowledge which would put us beyond our fellow negroes at
home on the plantations, while they would increase our pride by credit¬
ing us with far more knowledge than it was possible for us to have
gained . 85

Of the slaves who served the Confederate war effort, none would rank
higher in southern legend than the body servant. Accompanying his mas¬
ter (usually a more substantial planter or one of his sons) to military
service, he performed the duties of a personal attendant and relieved the
master of the more onerous camp chores; he might also be called upon to
forage the countryside for food, entertain the soldiers, help care for the
wounded, and dig trenches. Stephen Moore, servant to a South Carolina
planter, informed his wife that he had been well treated in camp and

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

enjoyed the leisure time available to him. "I have 3 meals of victuals to cook
a day & the rest of the time is mine.” Proud of his position, he asked his

wife '"to take this letter & read it to all my people.... Tell them all I have
been on the Battle field.” 86

Since they would spend considerable time together and undergo the
rigors of camp life and possibly enemy fire, a master took care in selecting
the right slave for the position. Usually, the honor—for it was so considered
by most—went to a slave who had already proven his fidelity, whose com¬
pany the master enjoyed, and who could be expected to perform faithfully
under the most trying circumstances; in many cases, he had previously
served his master as a personal attendant, caring for his clothes, horses,
and hounds. "Cyrus is a good boy indeed,” a Georgia officer wrote of his
servant, who had demonstrated both faithfulness and competence as a
forager and cook.

He has not had the first short word of dispute with a man since he left
home. He gives me no trouble at all. Attends well to my horse and things
general. I ask him sometimes if he does not want to go home—he replies
not without I go. Him, I and Beauregard [the horse] form quite a trio. I
will have to have our picture taken all together.

Overly pleased with the conduct and company of his body servant, a South
Carolina master paid the highest compliment he could conceive: "Why
weren’t you white! Why weren’t you white! Why weren’t you white!” 87

If the admonitions of some slave owners had been heeded, few of the
body servants would have been provided with opportunities for wartime
heroism. The usual procedure was to keep them behind the lines, not only
to protect their lives but to safeguard the owners’ investments as well. "I
hear you are likely to have a big battle soon,” a Virginia slaveholder
advised his son, "and I write to tell you not to let Sam go into the fight with
you. Keep him in the rear, for that nigger is worth a thousand dollars.”
Despite such considerations, the body servant often found himself sharing
with his master the ordeal of battle and enemy fire. Like the white soldiers
in his camp, he reacted with conduct that ranged from hysteria and flight
to feats of incredible bravery. The stories of how he stood steadfast by his
master and the instances in which he risked his life to recover the body of
his slain master and carted him home for a proper burial would be accorded
a prominent place in postwar recollections and tributes . 88

The intimacy and affection that bound servant and master in the
Army, like that which traditionally bound many house servants to the
families residing in the Big House, could not escape the ambivalence that
underlay the relationships formed in slavery. While most body servants
remained loyal and faithful attendants, earning the laurels accorded them,
significant numbers did not; in fact, some body servants calculatingly ex¬
ploited the trust placed in them to desert to the Yankees at the first
opportunity. Katie Darling, who had been a housegirl on a plantation in

"The Faithful Slave "

Texas, recalled how her father ran away from "Massa Bill" while the two

men were on their way to the battlefield. "Massa say when he come back
from the war, That triflin' nigger run 'way and jines up with them damn
Yankees." Lieutenant Theodorick W. Montfort, a Georgia farmer and law¬
yer, considered his body servant, Prince, to be "a most excellent" atten¬
dant. "You would be surprised to see how well he can cook & wash & how
neatly he can iron & put up clothes. He can do it as well as any woman.
I dont think you will want any better cook, washer & Ironer than he is by
the time the war is over." But when the Yankees captured and then in¬
terned Lieutenant Montfort, his prize servant seized the opportunity to
declare himself free. Not only did some body servants desert to the Yankees
but they also provided them with information on the number and location
of Confederate batteries; one such informer was subsequently recaptured,
handed over to loyal servants for punishment, and reportedly "met a death
at their hands more violent than any white person's anger could have
suggested.” 89

When Confederate military fortunes declined and rations ran short,
most of the body servants had to be sent home to help raise the necessary
food supplies. In returning to the plantations, they imparted to their fellow
slaves not only war experiences but the conversations they had overheard
around the campfires and from captured Yankees about the prospects of
a Union victory and emancipation. Although the white South would still
accord the body servant a place in the pantheon of Confederate heroes, his
conduct had often revealed an ambivalence that the coming of the Yankees
would make even more explicit in the occupied South. That conflict be¬
tween fidelity to the master and the yearning for freedom would manifest
itself in numerous ways and deeply trouble both whites and blacks, leaving
a bewildered white South to ponder, for example, over the behavior of a
body servant who risked his life to carry his wounded master to safety and
then remounted the master's horse and fled to the Yankee lines. Recalling
his own experience, Martin Jackson, who had been a slave in Texas, spoke
with considerable pride about the company in which he had served, but he
made no effort to hide the conflict of loyalties he had felt. "Just what my
feelings was about the War, I have never been able to figure out myself. I
knew the Yanks were going to win, from the beginning. I wanted them to
win and lick us Southerners, but I hoped they was going to do it without
wiping out our company ." 90

Even as the white South persisted in touting the fidelity, contentment,
and docility of its black population, there were limits to how much trust
could be reposed in them and to what kinds of services they would be
permitted to render. The employment of blacks as military laborers and
body servants occasioned no particular alarm, as their duties were consis¬
tent with the servile position they occupied in southern society. But the
proposal to enlist blacks as regular soldiers proved to be a different matter
altogether. In opposing any such move, an Alabama legislator could think
of no more effective argument than the example of his own body servant

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

"who had grown up with him from boyhood, who had gone with him to the
army and had shared with him, share and share alike, every article of food
and clothing,” and yet, inexplicably, "had seized the first opportunity
which presented of deserting him, and joining the Yankees.” Nevertheless,
the Confederacy would have to confront the issue of slaves as soldiers,
particularly after the Yankees began to reap such successes from the ex¬
periment. 91

After the bombardment of Fort Sumter, free blacks in several towns
organized themselves into military companies and offered their services to
their respective states. The most notable example proved to be the free
colored community of New Orleans, with its strong Creole element and the
tradition of having fought under Andrew Jackson in 1815. After announc¬
ing early in the war their determination to "take arms at a moment’s
notice and fight shoulder to shoulder with other citizens” in defense of the
city, two regiments of free colored men, known as the Native Guards, were
soon parading the streets with white soldiers. Although formally incorpo¬
rated into the Louisiana militia, the Native Guards were never called upon
for combat duty. The same disinclination to employ black troops appeared
elsewhere in the Confederacy. When sixty Richmond free blacks, bearing
a Confederate flag, proffered their services as soldiers, the local authorities
praised their loyalty and sent them home. 92

Whether such volunteers were motivated by opportunism, a genuine
patriotism, community coercion, or the prospect of better treatment is
difficult to determine. By serving the Confederates, a New Orleans black
leader later explained, they had hoped to improve their legal and social
position; at the same time, almost in self-defense, they had felt the need to
prove their fighting abilities and to learn the use of firearms, thereby
raising their esteem among both the whites and their own people. "No
matter where I fight,” a New Orleans black later told the Yankees, "I only
wish to spend what I have, and fight as long as I can, if only my boy may
stand in the street equal to a white boy when the war is over.” This may
help to explain the ease with which the Native Guards quickly switched
their loyalties after the fall of New Orleans; the colored troops—"the dark¬
est of whom,” said one Union general, "will be about the complexion of the
late Mr. [Daniel] Webster”—were subsequently mustered into Federal ser¬
vice and sent into battle against the Confederates at Port Hudson, Louisi¬
ana. 93

When Colonel James Chesnut’s slaves volunteered in March 1862 "to
fight for him if he would arm them,” he professed to believe them. But one
person could not make that decision, he told them. "The whole country
must agree to it.” Although there had been some proposals early in the war
to enlist slaves, usually in the form of appeals from planters in threatened
areas for permission to arm their slaves, the wisdom of such a drastic move
was never seriously debated by the Confederacy until late in 1863. With the
steady deterioration of the military effort, the question suddenly took on
a new importance. In the ensuing and often far-reaching debate, the rea-

"The Faithful Slave 73

sons advanced for slave enlistments ranged from the ifnproved moral posi-
tion of the South in the world community to how it might demoralize the
black Yankees. But the most compelling argument, as it had been in the
North, was that of military necessity. For some whites, at least, the urgent
need to preserve the independence of the South took precedence over the
institution upon which it was based, and the system they had initially
viewed as the economic strength of the South now loomed as a critical
source of military manpower as well. "The element which has been the
foundation of wealth should now be made the instrument of our salvation,”
a Mississippi slaveholder told his fellow planters. "Arm our slaves.” If the
Confederacy failed to utilize this manpower, he warned, "the Yankees will,
and the terminal scenes of this struggle ... will be the subjugation of the
Southern gentleman by his own slaves.” It behooved every patriotic slave¬
holder, then, to 'prepare the negro’s mind for the position he is about to
assume, and excite in him that love of country and of home which, I believe,
exists strongly in the negro’s breast.” Having reprinted this slaveholder’s
appeal, the New Orleans Tribune, a black newspaper established in 1864,
could not help but comment on its tragic irony: "The chivalrous Southern¬
ers, after bragging so long of their superiority above all other people, are
now, in the pangs of agony, stretching their hands for help to those for
whose enslavement they are trying to destroy their country.... They have,
with their own lips and by their own acts, given the lie to their Hiahr> l | C al’
purpose.” 94

_ Th® gravity of the military situation notwithstanding, any proposal to
enlist slaves as soldiers was bound to provoke strong opposition. When
confronted with the prospect of armed slaves, in fact, many whites all too
easily belied their previously expressed confidence in black loyalty and
fidelity. "Would they not, with arms in their hands, either desert to the
enemy or turn their weapons against us?” a prominent North Carolinian
asked. By undertaking this experiment, opponents warned, the South will
only have succeeded in introducing into the towns and countryside a verita¬
ble Trojan horse. "Are we prepared for this?” a Virginian asked. "To win
their freedom with our own independence, to establish in our midst a half
or quarter of a million of black freemen, familiar with the arts and disci¬
pline of war, and with large military experience!” At best, critics charged,
black recruitment would exchange "a profitable laborer for a very unprofit¬
able soldier,” and, at worst, it leveled all distinctions and elevated blacks
to equality with whites. If the Confederacy had to resort to such measures,
thereby violating all previous practices and teachings, some whites
thought it unworthy of survival. "The day you make soldiers of them is the
beginning of the end of the revolution,” General Howell Cobb warned. "If
slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” 95

After the military reverses of late 1864, the Confederacy edged still
closer to raising a black army. If nothing else, the heavy casualties they
were sustaining impressed whites with the need to draw upon their im¬
mense reservoir of black manpower. Why condemn to destruction "the

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

flower of our population, the hope of the country,” a Virginia newspaper
asked, "rather than mould to our use and make subsidiary to the great ends
of independence, the inferior race that has so long acknowledged our guid¬
ance and control! Surely, they are good enough for Yankee bullets.” What
little was left of slavery, Mary F. Akin wrote her husband in the Confeder¬
ate Congress, "should be rendered as serviceable as possible and for that
reason the negro men ought to be put to fighting and where some of them
will be killed. [I]f it is not done there will soon be more negroes than whites
in the country and they will be the free race. I want to see them got rid of
soon. ” Walter Clark, a young Confederate officer, had initially opposed the
enlistment of blacks but he now thought the policy deserved full support.
"Let Negro fight negro,” he advised. "This is an age of progressive ideas and
mighty changes.” 96

The arguments grew increasingly bitter and vindictive as the war
reached a desperate point. On March 13,1865, the Confederate Congress,
with the strong backing of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, finally au¬
thorized the enlistment of300,000 additional troops "irrespective of color ”
To allay the fears of many whites, the act stipulated that no state was to
enlist more than 25 percent of her able-bodied slave population between
the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Within a few days, advertisements
appeared in newspapers to urge the recruitment of blacks. In Richmond,
a company of blacks in Confederate uniforms paraded in the streets to
attract additional volunteers. Among those witnessing the spectacle was
John S. Wise, a Confederate officer and the son of a former governor of
Virginia. "Ah!” he thought, as he watched the "Confederate darkeys” drill
in Capitol Square, "this is but the beginning of the end.” 97

Although the law authorizing black recruits avoided the question of
emancipation, leaving that decision to the slave owners and the states, the
clear implication was that slaves who served in the Confederate Army
would be freed at the end of the war. But the promise of freedom as a
reward for military service, whether by law or by implication, came too late
to impress or deceive most slaves. "Til work for Massa Randolph good
’nough,” said a slave belonging to the former Confederate Secretary of
War, "but no want to fight for Massa Davis.” Bewildered by the remark,
someone asked him how he could stand by idly while the Yankees robbed
his master. "I knows nuthing 'bout politics,” the slave replied. But when
told that he might win his freedom by enlisting, this same slave suddenly
revealed a sound grasp of politics: "We niggers dat fight will be free, course;
but you see, massa, if some ob us don't fight, we all be free, Massa Lincum
says.” That same perception of reality had made Colonel James Chesnut's
slaves far less enthusiastic about military service. When the question had
first been broached, back in March 1862, they had talked enthusiastically
about enlisting and securing their freedom and a bounty. More than two
years later, however, with the military and political situation quite differ¬
ent, their tone had changed. "Now they say coolly that they don't want
freedom if they have to fight for it. That means they are pretty sure of
having it anyway.” 98

The Faithful Slave”

Even before the Confederate Congress authorized enlistments, some
slaves found ways to communicate their aversion to fighting for their
masters. In early 1865, a Richmond newspaper published a letter allegedly
written by a black man to the president of the Confederate Senate:

I hope you all will pass the law to arm the negro and the Day you do that
We do intend to fight you all and We have made up our minds to do it
when ever you all Will give us arms the Yankee is our friends, and you
all is our enemy, and give us arms and we will rase war right here, and
do you think we would fight again our friends for you all; no, never would
I do so."

When slaves were later questioned by Union soldiers about their willing¬
ness to bear arms for the Confederacy, they no doubt told them what they
wanted to hear but there is little reason in this instance to suspect the
blacks of duplicity. "My master offers me my freedom if I will take up
arms,” one slave told an escaped Union prisoner, "but I have a wife and
five children, and he does not offer them their freedom, and we have come
to the conclusion that there is no use fighting for our masters and our
freedom when any children we may have are to be made slaves, and we
have thought when we get arms and are allowed to be together in regi¬
ments, we can demand freedom for our wives and children, and take it.”
The day the Confederacy arms its slaves, a Georgia black assured General
Sherman, "dat day de war ends!” Equally explicit, another slave vowed
that his people would never have fought the Yankees. "I habe heard de
colored folks talk of it. They knowd all about it; dey’ll turn the guns on the
Rebs.” 100

The Confederacy had anticipated little difficulty in mobilizing slaves
for military duty. Nor did the proponents of black enlistments doubt the

efficiency with which such soldiers would serve. After all, an Alabama
newspaper suggested, "masters and overseers can marshal them for battle
by the same authority and habit of obedience with which they are mar¬
shalled to labor.” The end of the war, however, rendered such questions
academic. Few slaves were ever enlisted, and none of them apparently had
the opportunity to fight. Had the Confederacy managed to raise a black
army, it would seem unlikely, particularly after 1863, that it could have
fought with the same sense of commitment and self-pride that propelled
the black troops in the Union Army. When he first heard of the act to
recruit blacks for the Confederate Army, a Virginia freedman recalled, he
had suddenly found himself unable to restrain his emotions. "They asked
me if I would fight for my country. I said, T have no country.’ ” 101

While blacks were reluctant to take up arms to perpetuate the bond¬
age of their people, many were to regret that they had not struck harder

46 BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

for their liberation. If only there had been a massive upheaval, undermin¬
ing the Confederacy and expediting a Union victory, what wonders that
might have achieved for black self-pride. Felix Haywood, a former Texas
slave, tried to sort out his thoughts about that failure.

If every mother’s son of a black had thrown ’way his hoe and took up a
gun to fight for his own freedom along with the Yankees, the war’d been
over before it began. But we didn’t do it. We couldn’t help stick to our
masters. We couldn’t no more shoot ’em than we could fly. My father and
me used to talk ’bout it. We decided we was too soft and freedom wasn’t
goin’ to be much to our good even if we had a education.

Only in retrospect, too, did Robert Falls, who had endured a harsh bondage
in North Carolina, regret the essentially submissive role he had played
during his more than twenty years as a slave. "If I had my life to live over,”
he reflected, "I would die fighting rather than be a slave again.... But in
t bpm days, us niggers didnt know no better. All we knowed was work, and
hard work. We was learned to say, 'Yes Sir!’ and scrape down and bow, and
to do just exactly what we was told to do, make no difference if we wanted
to or not.” His father, in whom he had considerable pride, had symbolized
for F alls the virtues and perhaps the futility of the slave rebel’s usually
lonely struggle. "Now my father, he was a fighter. He was mean as a bear.
He was so bad to fight and so troublesome he was sold four times to my
knowing and maybe a heap more times.” 102

The extent of black insurrectionary activity during the Civil War re¬
mains a subtle question. What is nearly impossible to determine in each
instance is whether the reported revolt or plot was actually consummated,
whether it existed only in the fevered imaginations of war-weary whites,
or, far more commonly, whether "insurrection” simply became a way to
define "suspicious activity,” "insubordination,” and organized flight to the
Yankees. None of the wartime slave plots and uprisings achieved any
spectacular results. But the psychic impact was formidable, each report
and rumor reminding the white South of the potential that resided in its
black population. The specter of servile insurrection hovered over the de¬
bate on enlisting blacks into the Confederate Army and intruded itself on
the confidence with which whites periodically congratulated themselves
over the docility of their slaves. The many reports that quantities of arms,
gunpowder, knives, and hatchets had been found secreted under the floors
of slave cabins revived traditional fears, and some planters ordered that
hoes, axes, and other implements that might serve as weapons be locked
up at night. The sound of fire bells excited still more panic, with the
increase in arson attempts ascribed to blacks, particularly after it became
known that slave rebels in Mississippi had planned to inaugurate an insur¬
rection by burning the city of Natchez. 103

The initial fears stemmed from reports that slaves in certain regions
were preparing to wage insurrectionary warfare the moment the white

"The Faithful Slave”

volunteers left for military service or as soon as Yankee troops came into
the vicinity. Within months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, ru¬
mors of a black uprising placed Charleston residents on alert, and insurrec¬
tionary plots were uncovered in Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky,
South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi. 104 In May 1861, a citizens’
committee in Kingston, Georgia, ordered the hanging of a slave after hear¬
ing evidence that pointed to "one of the most diabolical schemes ever
devised by any fiend to murder the citizens of this county, and take posses¬
sion of their property.” That same month, Edmund Ruffin reported the
discovery of a conspiracy in Virginia which had been organized at "night
meetings for pretended religious worship.” But he claimed to be unshaken
by the news.

A conspiracy discovered & repressed is better assurance of safety than if
no conspiracy had been heard of or suspected. While I deem there is not
the least ground for alarm & that this conspiracy, if undiscovered, would
have had no dangerous results—still we ought to be always vigilant, &
be ready to meet attacks, whether from northern invaders or negro insur¬
gents.

With less equanimity, a white family in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, de¬
scribed the slaves in their neighborhood as "verry bold” and "trying to
make up a company to rise.” When overtaken, one of the conspirators
"abused his Master to the last and told him that the North was fighting for
the Negroes now [and] that he was as free as his Master.” The accused rebel
was then bound and left behind while the whites pursued the remaining
conspirators. Upon their return, they found that "he had got loos and taken
the cords that he was tied with and hung him self.” Not far from this scene,
and at nearly the same time, a Louisiana planter, having crawled under
a slave cabin, overheard his slaves plotting a revolt. 105

Although whites tried to downplay the impact of the Emancipation
Proclamation, President Lincoln’s preliminary announcement in Septem¬
ber 1862 promptly set off a new wave of rumors and reports of insurrection.
"It was very weak and ill-arranged,” Emma Holmes of Camden, South
Carolina, said of a plot discovered in her district, and several blacks were
scheduled to hang. In December, one month before the Proclamation took
effect, a Confederate militia unit from Mississippi requested that it be
permitted to disband and return home for the Christmas holiday, not for
purposes of merriment but to forestall an anticipated slave uprising. "[W]e
deem it highly necessary that we should be there for the defense of our
families,” a spokesman for the group advised the governor, "as the negroes
are making their brags that by the first of January they will be free as we
are and a general outbreak is expected about that time.” No doubt this was
not the only militia unit which preferred to take its chances with slave
rebels rather than Yankee soldiers. 106

With emancipation an avowed Union objective, persistent reports cir-

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

culated that blacks intended to stage a general revolt that would affect
every part of the South and begin with the destruction of railroad tracks,
telegraph lines, and bridges. Julia LeGrand, a young white woman, heard
that the revolt would fall on New Year’s Day 1863, and no place would be
safe, not even the Union-occupied New Orleans in which she resided.

I feel no fear, but many are in great alarm-Fires are frequent—it is

feared that incendiaries are at work. Last night was both cold and windy.

The bells rang out and the streets resounded with cries. I awoke from
sleep and said, "Perhaps the moment has come.” ... Mrs. Norton has a
hatchet, a tomahawk, and a vial of some kind of spirits with which she
intends to blind all invaders. We have made no preparations, but if the
worst happen we will die bravely no doubt . 107

Reinforcing the rumors of an impending general insurrection, reports
mounted during the last two years of the war of the existence of "under¬
ground” organizations among the slaves. An escaped Union prisoner re¬
lated how he had been assisted by a secret society which included "men
whom their masters trusted in important transactions.” In Livingston
Parish, Louisiana, a woman informed her husband of a terrible stir
involving more than a hundred slaves belonging to two planters; the con¬
spirators organized a company, elected officers, stole guns and horses, and
were "all ready just as quick as the word was given to go to work.” Local
whites put down the uprising, numerous slaves were whipped "very bad,”
and five were scheduled to hang. 108

If whites tended to blur the distinction between an "insurrection” and
an organized escape to the enemy, they often had good reason. In Amite
County, Mississippi, some thirty or more armed slaves seized their masters’
horses and "openly with boldness, cheers and shouting” made their way
toward Union-occupied Natchez; within fifteen miles of their destination,
however, the slaves were overtaken and most of them killed. With far
greater success, Elijah Marrs mobilized twenty-seven slaves in Simpson-
ville, Kentucky, for an escape to the Union lines nearby; they used the local
church for a headquarters, elected Marrs their captain, and accumulated
an arsenal of "twenty-six war clubs and one old rusty pistol.” Reaching
Louisville before their owners, the slaves marched to the recruiting office
and enlisted in the Union Army. 109

The awesome number of mass punishments meted out to suspected
black rebels often reflected nothing more than sheer hysteria. Although
some whites thought their worst fears were about to be realized, the fact
remains that the slaves failed to execute a major wartime rebellion. That
failure was something the postwar white South chose to recall, as did
certain black leaders eager to calm post-emancipation fears of a wave of
black terror. "We never inaugurated a servile insurrection,” Georgia freed-
men would memorialize the legislature in 1866, exaggerating their race’s
submission.

"The Faithful Slave”

We stayed peaceably at our homes, and labored with our usual industry.

While you were absent fighting in the field, though we knew our power
at the same time, and would frequently speak of it. We knew then it was
in our power to rise, fire your houses, bum your barns, railroads, and
discommode you in a thousand ways, so much so, that we could have
swept the country, like a fearful tornado. But we preferred then as we
do now, to wait on God, and trust to the instincts of your humanity . 110

With different degrees of emphasis, some observers ascribed the ab¬
sence of any large-scale servile insurrection to "the habit of patience” that
bondage had instilled in black people. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for
example, an abolitionist Union officer commanding a black regiment in the
South, often asked himself why "this capacity of daring and endurance” he
observed in his soldiers had not kept the South "in a perpetual flame of
insurrection.” One answer, he reflected, must lie somewhere "in the pecu¬
liar temperament of the races, in their religious faith, and in the habit of
patience that centuries had fortified.” 111

But the discussions which Colonel Higginson had with his own men
revealed that "the habit of patience” explained rather little. Around the
campfires, at least, when any of the black soldiers broached the subject of
insurrection, they spoke of a lack of information, money, arms, drill, orga¬
nization, and mutual confidence—"the tradition” that nearly every revolt
had been betrayed at the outset. "The shrewder men all said substantially
the same thing,” Higginson observed. "What was the use of insurrection,
where everything was against them?” To many blacks, in fact, talk of
rebellion was simply "fool talk,” a suicidal form of resistance. By mid-1862,
the Christian Recorder, a black newspaper in Philadelphia, had lost its
patience with those northern whites who envisioned a slave uprising as the
death gasp of the Confederacy. When the war first broke out, the editor
noted, and the North had expected a quick triumph, the mere hint of a
slave rebellion would have aroused nationwide indignation.

Now, that same people want the slaves to rise up and fight for their
liberty. Rise against what?—powder, cannon, ball and grape-shot? Not a
bit of it. They have got too much good sense. Since you have waited till
every man, boy, woman and child in the so-called Southern Confederacy
has been armed to the teeth, ’tis folly and mockery for you now to say
to the poor, bleeding and downtrodden sons of Africa, "Arise and fight for
your liberty!”

The point was well made. From the outset of the war, it had been apparent

to many observers, white and black, that the Yankees were as likely to
betray a rebellion as some slave informer. The President, anxious to hold
the border states in line, had made it clear on numerous occasions that this
war was not being waged to provoke servile insurrection. Had there been
a slave rebellion, Colonel Higginson conceded, it would surely have divided

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

northern sentiment, "and a large part of our army would have joined with
the Southern army to hunt them down.” It was not, then, a black journalist
explained, that the slaves were too ill informed to revolt. "They are too well
informed and too wise to court destruction at the hands of the combined
Northern and Southern armies.” 112

The absence of any major slave revolts during the Civil War should in
no way obscure the nature and extent of the resistance that accompanied,
often in the same person, the more celebrated slave virtues of obedience,
fidelity, and patience. Not all slaves waited for freedom to be thrust upon
them, nor did pro-Union blacks necessarily confine their activities to secre¬
tive prayers and midnight meetings. Where it was possible to expedite the
Union cause, there were almost always some slaves and free blacks willing
to take the risks. While a few operated as Union spies, still larger numbers
provided the Union Army with valuable information about Confederate
campsites, troop movements, and morale and guided Union forces when
they came into the vicinity. "A negro brought the Yankees from Pineville/
a white South Carolinian noted with dismay, "and piloted them to where
our men were camped, taking them completely by surprise, capturing
Bright and killing two of his men.” Alarmed at the effective use made of
slave informants by the Union Army, Confederate officials urged severe
punishment of any blacks found engaged in such activity, and soldiers
resorted to various ruses to ferret them out. In Berkeley County, South
Carolina, where a black driver had come under suspicion as an informant,
Confederate scouts disguised as Yankees went to his cabin, offered to pay
him if he could lead them to a reported Confederate camp in the swamps,
and then "hung the traitor” when he did so. By early 1864, however, a
Confederate officer thought slave activity on behalf of the Union Army
had reached the point of "an omnipresent spy system, pointing out our val¬
uable men to the enemy, revealing our positions, purposes, and resources,
and yet acting so safely and secretly that there is no means to guard against
it.” 113

The literature of the Civil War is replete, too, with stories of how slaves
and free blacks rendered invaluable assistance to Union soldiers who had
escaped from Confederate prisons. Several such prisoners testified that
their escape would have been impossible had it not been for the blacks who
fed them and guided them to the Union lines. "George has brought us food
during the day, and will try to get us a guide to-night,” an escaped Union,
soldier noted in the diary he kept during his flight. "Sometimes,” another
escapee reported, "forty negroes, male and female, would come to us from
one plantation, each one bringing something to give, and lay it at our feet,
in the aggregate corn bread and potatoes enough to feed a regiment.”
Fearing the consequences if they were detected, some slaves proved less
helpful, while still others treated the Yankees as enemies and reported
escapees to local authorities. One Union soldier who managed to escape
from Andersonville recalled an uncooperative black woman who pro-

"The Faithful Slave”

claimed her hatred for all white men, Yankees and Confederates alike, and
refused to assist him in any way. "She was the only one of the race I ever
applied to in vain for assistance.” 114

Judged by the reaction it generated, the most spectacular and cele¬
brated exploit of a black man during the Civil War concerned the delivery
of a Confederate steamer to the Union Navy. The protagonist in this drama
was Robert Smalls, a Charleston slave who had been hired out on the
waterfront for several years and had acquired a boatman’s skills. In 1862,
impressed into service, Smalls worked as an assistant pilot on the Planter,
a cotton steamer converted by the Confederate government into an armed
transport. On the night of May 12,1862, the ship was docked in Charleston
with some artillery newly loaded aboard. The officers and white crewmen
had gone ashore, leaving Smalls to prepare the vessel for departure the
next day. But the black crew, including the families of Robert Smalls and
his brother, chose to leave prematurely aboard the Planter , thereby culmi¬
nating Smalls’s plan to deliver the steamer intact to the Union ships
blockading Charleston harbor. "I thought the Planter might be of some use
to Uncle Abe,” he remarked afterwards. The North hailed him as a hero,
and the government commissioned him an officer in the United States
Colored Troops. Smalls returned at the helm of the Planter to witness the
United States flag raised over Fort Sumter, and by this time he was well
on his way toward becoming a legendary figure among South Carolina
blacks. "Smalls ain’t God!” a skeptical black told one of Smalls’s admirers.
"That’s true, that’s true,” he replied, "but Smalls’ young yet.” To the white
South, the entire episode seemed impossible to grasp. Emma Holmes of
Camden, South Carolina, confided her "horrified” reaction to the diary she
kept, pronouncing Smalls’s act "most disgraceful” and "one of the boldest
and most daring things of the war.” 115

Few slaves were in a position to emulate the heroism of Robert Smalls.
If they manifested their desire for freedom, it would have to take less
spectacular forms. No less dramatic, however, and equally far-reaching,
was the decision made by tens of thousands of slaves not to wait for the
Yankees but to expedite liberation by fleeing to the Union lines. "We had
heard it since last Fall,” an escaped slave told the Yankees in May 1861,
"that if Lincoln was elected, you would come down and set us free. And the
white-folks used to say so, but they don’t talk so now; the colored people
have talked it all over; we heard that if we could get in here [the Union
camp] we should be free, or at any rate, we should be among friends.” With
the advance of the Union Army, the legendary North Star that had once
illuminated the road out of bondage lost its strategic importance; freedom
was as close as the nearest Union camp, perhaps only down the road or
across a nearby swamp or river. "See how much better off we are now dan
we was four years ago,” a successful runaway exulted. "It used to be five
hundred miles to git to Canada from Lexington, but now it’s only eighteen
miles! Camp Nelson is now our Canada.” 116

Until at least midway through the war, Federal policy toward slave run¬
aways remained unclear and inconsistent. Although the Lincoln adminis¬
tration endorsed the decision of General Benjamin F. Butler to treat them
as "contraband of war,” Union commanders in the field persisted in mak¬
ing their own judgments, with some officers returning fugitives and uphold¬
ing the legal right of loyal slaveholders to their property. The Fugitive
Slave Act remained operative until mid-1864, though only loyal masters
(as defined usually by local commanders) could seek to reclaim runaways
under its provisions. Federal legislation in 1862, however, barred military
personnel from participating in the return of fugitive slaves and decreed
that the escaped slaves of disloyal masters would be forever free. 117

Whether defined as "contraband of war,” "fugitives,” or "freedmen,”
they ceased to be slaves when they reached the Union lines. That was the
news the "grapevine telegraph” quickly circulated, thereby swelling the
number of slaves seeking out the Yankees. The "exodus affected some
plantations and regions far more severely than others, with those more
remote from the war and the advancing Union Army recording the fewest
successful escapes. In King William County, northeastern Virginia, nearly
half the able-bodied male slaves between the ages of eighteen and forty-five
fled in the first two years of the war, and a white resident of northern
Virginia thought scarcely any slaves remained in that section of the coun¬
try—"they have all gone to Canaan, by way of the York River, Chesapeake
Bay, and the Potomac.” In North Carolina, a Confederate officer estimated
in August 1862 that one million dollars’ worth of slaves were fleeing every
week. By 1863, Union-occupied Vicksburg and Natchez had become centers
for slave runaways in Mississippi, and that same year thousands of Louisi¬
ana slaves entered the Union lines at Baton Rouge and New Orleans. After
its capture in early 1862, Femandina, Florida, served as a haven for fugi¬
tives from Georgia and Florida, much as Beaufort did for South Carolina
slaves. 118

Although some runaways traveled in well-organized and armed con¬
tingents, this was largely a spontaneous movement, made up of single
persons and groups of families. Slaves would leave the plantations at night,
conceal themselves in the woods or swamps during the day, and seek out
the nearest Yankee camp or Union-held town. The more fortunate fled in
horse carts and ox carts, or even in the master’s buggy, while still others
made use of boats, rafts, and canoes and their knowledge of the local
waterways. Determined to enter the Union lines at Hilton Head, South
Carolina, Jack Flowers hid in the rice swamps during the day and crept
along at night until he reached the woods and a nearby river; he then made
a basket boat, woven out of reeds cut in the swamp, caulked with cotton
picked from the fields, and smeared with pitch from the pine trees, and
successfully paddled his way to freedom. With few resources at their com-

"The Faithful Slave ”

mand, many refugees had to walk long distances on swollen and bleeding
feet, carrying bundles of clothing or children on their shoulders. Two Loui¬
siana families waded six miles across a swamp, spending two days and
nights in mud and water to their waists, their children clinging to their
backs. Some managed to carry away their few belongings, usually old rags,
bedding, and furniture, which were piled onto carts and wagons. Several
of the women attired themselves in their mistress’s clothes, and the men
occasionally raided the master’s wardrobe before departing. Many, how¬
ever, left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing: "Well, massa,
we’d thought freedom better than clothes, so we left them.” 119

To succeed required not only the physical strength to endure the trek
but the ingenuity that might be necessary to elude pursuers. They devised
various ruses and concoctions by which to throw off the bloodhounds, or
simply clung to the swamps and rivers to cover up their tracks. They were
known to dress themselves in Confederate uniforms and flee on their mas¬
ters’ horses. They took advantage of the confusion and panic caused by the
movement of troops and the sound of gunfire. Mary Lynn, a forty-five-year-
old Virginia field hand, used the Christmas holiday festivities, when her
absence for several days would not be noticed, to effect her escape. On some
plantations, the slaves derived what initial advantages they could by tying
up their master and overseer before fleeing. In Colonel Higginson’s black
regiment, a freed slave named Cato related, to the obvious pleasure of his
audience, the tale of his escape and how he had used some time-honored
strategy to deceive and extract information from a white planter he en¬
countered along the way. Overhearing the story, while standing in the
background of the gathering, Higginson noted not only the freedman’s
words but how they were received.

"Den I go up to de white man, berry humble, and say, would he please
gib ole man a mouthful for eat?

"He say he must hab de valeration ob half a dollar.

"Den I look berry sorry, and turn for go away.

"Den he say I might gib him dat hatchet I had.

"Den I say” (this in a tragic vein) "dat I must hab dat hatchet for
defend myself from de dogs!”

(Immense applause, and one appreciating auditor says, chuckling,
"Dat was your arms , ole man,” which brings down the house again.)

"Den he say de Yankee pickets was near by, and I must be very
keerful.

"Den I say, 'Good Lord, Mas’r, am dey?’ ”

Commenting on the soldier’s conclusion of the story, Higginson conceded
that words alone could hardly capture "the complete dissimulation with
which these accents of terror were uttered,—this being precisely the piece
of information he wished to obtain.” 120

If slavery was really so disagreeable, Mary Chesnut suggested rather
smugly in July 1861, "why don’t they all march over the border where they

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

would be received with open arms. It amazes me.” For all of her insights
into the "inscrutable” slave, she was in no position to perceive the daring
and courage required for a successful escape, the magnitude of the risks,
and the certainty of severe punishment for those who failed. "Ah, you
know, my bredren,” an elderly runaway told a group of freedmen, "how dey
try to keep us from gittin’ to Camp Nelson. Some o’ you hev only jist got
from behind; where Massa ask you, 'Would you like to be free, David?’ 0’
course I should; but den, if I say so, dey jist cross my hands, tie 'em up, strip
me; den whip me wid the cowhide, till I tell a lie, and say 'No.’ ” That only
a small percentage of slaves chose flight suggests the kinds of obstacles they
fa re d There were mounted citizens’ patrols, river patrols, and Confederate
sentine ls that had to be eluded, as well as pursuing bloodhounds ("the
detective officers of Slavery’s police,” one freedman called them); some of
the boats used by runaways broke apart or overturned, drowning the occu¬
pants; and nervous Union guards sometimes mistook escapees for enemy
soldiers and shot and killed them. While attempting to escape across a river
to the Union lines, a young slave and his mother were fired upon by the
master’s son; the mother managed to reach the other bank safely but her
son died soon afterwards from bullet wounds. Some years before, her hus¬
band and two other sons had been sold, and she was now left to lament her
most recent and ironic fate:

My poor baby is shot dead by that young massa I nussed with my own
boy. They was both babies together. Missus made me nuss her baby, an’
set her little girl to watch me, for fear I’d give my baby too much, no
matter how hard he cried. Many times I wasn’t allowed to take him up,
an’ now that same boy has killed mine.

Even if certain and severe punishment awaited apprehended runaways,
they might have counted themselves fortunate to be returned to their
masters; in numerous instances, mounted slave patrols ran them down
with their horses, shot them on the road, or tied them to the horses and
dragged them to the nearest jail. 121

Although hardly unique to the Civil War, the slave runaway most
vividly demonstrated to an already apprehensive white South the break¬
down and possible collapse of discipline and control. To many whites, in
fact, there was little to distinguish the runaway from the rebel; both threat¬
ened to bring down the system, and reports of new desertions invariably
fueled talk of subversion, insurrection, and the very death of slavery.
"They are traitors who may pilot an enemy into your bedchamber!” the
Reverend C. C. Jones of Georgia warned. "They know every road and
swamp and creek and plantation in the county, and are the worst of spies.
If the absconding is not stopped, the Negro property of the county will be
of little value.” This usually reserved churchman, who prided himself on
his religious work with the slaves, became so deeply disturbed over the
mounting reports of runaways in the neighborhood that he suggested the

"The Faithful Slave”

need to define them as insurrectionists and mete out summary justice.
After all, he wrote his son in the Confederate Army, "they declare them¬
selves enemies and at war with owners by going over to the enemy who is
seeking both our lives and property.” Responding to his father’s concerns,
Charles C. Jones, Jr., who had served as mayor of Savannah before enlist¬
ing in the Army, disdained anything that would "savor of mob law” but
agreed that defectors who evinced sufficient intelligence and leadership
qualities to devise "a matured plan of escape” and to influence others to
flee should be treated as armed insurrectionists and executed. "If insensi¬
ble to every other consideration,” Colonel Jones suggested, "terror must be
made to operate upon their minds, and fear prevent what curiosity and
desire for utopian pleasures induce them to attempt.” 122

Nearly everyone loyal to the Confederacy conceded that the effective¬
ness of any system designed to thwart slave desertions rested ultimately
on local and individual vigilance. While some whites might choose to de¬
bate legal niceties, most of them were concerned only with achieving imme¬
diate and conclusive results. Henry A. Middleton, a South Carolina
planter, obviously appreciated the dispatch with which Georgetown
County had dealt with apprehended runaways.

[0]f the people who went away three men, returned to the plantation of
Dr. McGill and carried away their wives—the six were taken together
making their way to the enemy. The men were tried yesterday by the
provost martials court—they were sentenced to be hung—to day one
oclock was fixed for the execution that no executive clemency might
intervene ... there was a crowd—the blacks were encouraged to be
present—the effect will not soon be forgotten. 123

On the nearby Allston rice plantation, Stephen (the valet) had defected
with his wife and children, and the effect on the other slaves, according to
the overseer, had been noticeable: "I Can see since Stephn left a goodeal
of obstanetry in Some of the Peopl. Mostly mongst the Woman a goodeal
of Quarling and disputeing & teling lies.” That was all the more reason for
Adele Petigru Allston, who had become the mistress of the plantation upon
the death of her husband, to act firmly in this matter. Unable to apprehend
Stephen, she resolved to make an example of his wife’s mother, not so
much out of spite as the conviction that parents and relations should be
held responsible for the actions of their families. "You know all the cir¬
cumstances of Stephen’s desertion,” she wrote the local magistrate.

You know that his wife is Mary’s daughter and she is the third of her
children who have gone off.... It is too many instances in her family for
me to suppose she is ignorant of their plans and designs. She has been
always a highly favoured servant, and all her family have been placed
in positions of confidence and trust. I think this last case should be visited
in some degree on her.

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

At the same time, Adele Allston informed Jesse Belfiowers, the overseer,
of her decision to remove Mary and James (Stephen’s father) to "some place
of confinement” in the interior of the state and hold them there "as hos¬
tages for the conduct of their children.” If by making an example of these
individuals, she had thought to instill proper subordination in the remain¬
ing slaves, subsequent events on the Allston plantations, particularly with
the coming of the Yankees, would prove less than reassuring. 124

What compounded the problem of control was the difficulty of antici¬
pating defections; every slave owner would have to make his own determi¬
nation and act accordingly. Anxious about retaining his house servant and
cook, a Georgia planter put heavy iron shackles on her feet while she
worked and locked her in the cornhouse at night. In the Mississippi River
region, a Union officer who returned from a raid with two hundred slaves
reported having found twenty-five of them chained in a cane brake. On the
plantation in Virginia where Susie Bums labored, any slave contemplating
an escape during the war years needed to elude the vigilant eye and
drunken wrath of the master. "Used to set in his big chair on de porch wid
a jug of whiskey by his side drinkin’ an’ watchin’ de quarters to see that
didn’t none of his slaves start slippin’ away.” More commonly, a slave
owner made an example of runaways who were apprehended and returned
to the plantation. If not immediately sold, they were liable to be whipped,
chained at night, put to work on Confederate fortifications, or removed for
safekeeping to non-threatened areas. After thwarting an attempted escape,
the son of a South Carolina planter sold two of the leaders in Charleston
and punished the others "by whips and hand-cuffing,” making certain that
they were chained and watched at night. But some planters, acting as
though their tenure as slave owners might be short-lived, were so unnerved
by defections that they vented all of their frustrations on those they could
apprehend. "W’en de Union soldiers wur near us,” a freedwoman named
Affy recalled, "some o’ de young han’s run off to git to de Union folks, an’
massa ketch dem an’ hang dem to a tree, an’ shoot dem; he t’ink no more’n
to shoot de culled people right down.... But t’ank God, I got away, an’ him
won’t git me agin.” 125

Even in the face of danger and repeated failures, the slaves persisted
in their attempts to reach the Union lines. Having been thwarted in their
initial attempt to escape from a plantation near Savannah, a seventy-year-
old black woman and her husband immediately made plans to try again.
While the plantation whites were meting out punishment to her husband,
she collected their twenty-two children and grandchildren in a nearby
marsh. After drifting some forty miles down the river in a dilapidated
flatboat, the family was rescued by a Union gunboat. "My God!” she ex¬
claimed as they came aboard, "are we free?” Her husband subsequently
made good on his second escape attempt. No less persistent was a Maryland
servant who tried to join others in a mass escape despite the fact that his
hands and feet had been amputated some years before because of severe
frostbite. "Well, I got him back and had him tied up,” the owner told a

"The Faithful Slave”

visiting Englishman, 'Tor I thought he must be mad. But it was no use, he
got away again, and walked to Washington.” How, asked the curious visi¬
tor, could he have managed such a remarkable deed? The answer no doubt
must have seemed equally incredible.

Oh, he just stumped along. He was always a right smart nigger, and he
could do many things after he lost his limbs. He could attend to the
cooking and sew with his teeth very well, and could get on a horse and
ride as easy as look. He was always a remarkably strong nigger. Why,
even after he lost his hands, he could kill a man, almost, with a blow of
one of his knobs.

The persistence of some black runaways came at the expense of their white
pursuers. After overtaking his slave in a swamp, a South Carolina master
found himself engaged in a fierce struggle. He managed to shoot the slave
in the arm, shattering it badly. Knowing what awaited him if captured, the
fugitive grimly fought on, unhorsed his master, and then beat him "until
he was senseless.” 126

Rather than flee to the Yankees, numerous slaves responded to partic¬
ular provocations, as they had before the war, by decamping for the nearby
woods or swamps, where they might hide out for extensive periods of time.
After all, even the much-hunted Nat Turner had managed to elude his
pursuers for nearly eight weeks. Near the end of the war, Anna Miller
recalled, "my sis and nigger Horace runs off. Dey don’ go far, and stays in
de dugout. Ev’ry night dey’d sneak in and git lasses and milk and what food
dey could. My sis had a baby and she nuss it ev’ry night when she comes.
Dey runs off to keep from gettin’ a whuppin\” Far more dangerous were
the colonies of runaways that formed in some areas, from which slaves
would forage the countryside for provisions. While searching for runaways,
a group of whites in South Carolina found such a settlement in a nearby
swamp, "well provided with meal, cooking utensils, blankets, etc.,” as well
as twelve guns and an ax. In Surry County, Virginia, a scouting party
investigated a similar runaway camp but never lived to report their
findings; the fugitives killed them. 127

Assumptions about slave contentment, docility, or indifference pre¬
pared few whites for the extent of the runaway problem. "Unlettered
reason or the mere inarticulate decision of instinct brought them to us,”
thought one Union officer, while a white resident of Natchez deemed it
little wonder "that they long to throw aside their chains and live like white
people’ as they say.” The slaves themselves had little difficulty in explain¬
ing why they had fled. Reflecting upon their escapes, exchanging stories
across the campfires in the contraband villages, answering the queries of
Union officers and reporters, they usually talked about the oppressiveness
of enslavement, the difficulties of carrying out plantation duties while
freedom was so close at hand, and the determination to liberate themselves
rather than wait for the Yankees.

-1

58 BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Massa wanted we niggers to go 'way with him, but we want come to
Yankees ’cause he treat us too bad. We hear you come down long time
ago. Massa said de Yankees would take de niggers and sell us in Cuba,
and want us to fight, but we talk it over, and agreed to come to de
Yankees. When Massa ran away he shot one man’ lip off*, who refused to
follow him. I want to be free. I know freemen have to work—can’t live
without work. Dere’s great difference between free and slave. When you
free you work and de money b’long to yourself. 128

Fearing imminent removal or sale, some slaves chose to escape. The
moment her master ordered all the house servants into wagons, a Virginia
slave went into hiding. Thomas Pritchard, a carpenter, disappeared while
the master and a slave broker were discussing the terms of his sale. Some
slaves had heard rumors that they were about to be conscripted for military
service or put to work on Confederate fortifications. "They’s jest takin’ me,
sir,” Tom Jackson of Virginia explained, "an* I run off.” Some were eager
to locate their families or join the slaves from their plantation who had
already escaped. "All of our friends were ober here,” a runaway explained.
Isaac Tatnall, who had been hired out, fled when his master refused to pay
him his share of the wages. "Last month,” Tatnall remarked, "master took
him all, but he lost by dat, cause dis month I runned away, and he’s lost
$1,880.” 129

The uncontrolled rage of their masters, often for no easily ascertain¬
able reason other than the imminent loss of the war, hastened the depar¬
ture of many slaves. "They does it to spite us,” a runaway woman testi¬
fied, " ’cause you come here. Dey spites us now ’cause de Yankees come.”
This woman had just escaped with two of her children, leaving behind her
eldest son whom the master had just "licked” almost to death because he
suspected him of wanting to join the Yankees. Stories of recent beatings
ran through the testimony of numerous newly arrived refugees. "Master
whipped me two or three weeks ago,” a freedwoman declared, "because I
let the cows from the bog road into the yard. Struck me and knocked me
down with his fist. Left Monday night, and walked all the way. I am free;
come here to be protected; was not safe to stay.” On the morning of his
escape, a Georgia slave noted, he had been promised a whipping, but "when
de time came dis chile was about five miles from dar, and he nebber stopped
until las night.” Among the slaves who fled after harsh treatment were
those who felt compelled to contain their anger rather than risk the conse¬
quences of direct retaliation. "They didn’t do something and run,” a former
slave suggested. "They run before they did it, ’cause they knew that if they
struck a white man there wasn’t going to be a nigger.” 130

Although specific provocations helped to sustain the steady movement
toward the Union lines, the overriding consideration remained the pros¬
pect of freedom and the pride that a slave took in expediting his or her own
liberation. "I wants to be free,” a South Carolina runaway kept repeating.
"I came in from the plantation and don’t want to go back; I don’t want to

f The Faithful Slave' 3

go back; I don’t want to be a slave again.” The intensity of this feeling even
induced elderly slaves to make the perilous trek, refusing to postpone any
longer that dream that had eluded them for a lifetime. "Ise eighty-eight
year old,” one refugee told the Yankees. "Too ole for come? Mas’r joking.
Neber too ole for leave de land o’ bondage.” Near Vicksburg, where slaves
had been deserting in substantial numbers, a planter went out to the
quarters and asked the "patriarch” among his slaves, "Uncle Si, I don’t
suppose you are going off to those hateful Yankees, too, are you?” "O no,
marster,” he replied, "Fse gwine to stay right here with you.” When the
planter visited the quarters the next morning, he found that every one of
his slaves had left that night, including Uncle Si and his wife. Searching
the nearby woods for them, he came across Uncle Si, bending over the
prostrate body of his wife, weeping. The planter wondered why he had
subjected her to such a difficult and now fatal journey. "I couldn’t help it,
marster,” the old man replied; "but then, you see, she died free.” 131

Whether or not a slave chose to desert his master did not necessarily
reflect a personal history ofbrutal treatment. Alex Huggins, who ran away
in 1863 at the age of twelve, recalled no complaints about the way his
master and mistress had treated him : "Twa’nt anythin’ wrong about home
that made me run away. I’d heard so much talk ’bout freedom I reckon I
jus’ wanted to try it, an’ I thought I had to get away from home to have
it.” The verbal exchange that took place in late 1861 between a Union
soldier and a runaway revealed as vividly what many whites would find so
difficult to understand and forgive in their slaves.

"How were you treated, Robert?”

"Pretty well, sar.”

"Did your master give you enough to eat and clothe you comfort¬
ably?”

"Pretty well, till dis year. Massa hab no money to spend dis year.
Don’t get many clothes dis year.”

"If you had a good master, I suppose you were contented?”

"No, sar.”

"Why not, if you had enough to eat and clothes to wear?”

"Cause I want to be free. ” 132

Neither the number of reported "insurrections” nor an accurate count of
the runaways could adequately measure slave resistance and disaffection
during the final years of the "peculiar institution.” Equally significant for
slaveholders were the kinds of rumors that circulated, the fears that were
generated, the outbreaks of "insolence” and "insubordination” which could
drive individual families and entire communities to the brink of hysteria,

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

and the various ways in which enslaved blacks—consciously or otherwise
—brought anguish and frustration to those who claimed to own them.

Even before the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves perceived on the
faces of their "white folks” a growing uneasiness and resignation. The
certainty of Confederate victory seemed far less pronounced, the patriotic
oratory less believable, and there crept into the conversations of white men
and women the apprehension that life as they had known it might never
survive this war. No matter how desperately slaveholding families wanted
to believe in the faithfulness of their blacks, and despite the patriotic and
loyal models they could display and would forever venerate, there persisted
an undercurrent of suspicion and fear that could never be successfully
repressed and that surfaced with every rumor of an uprising, every case of
insubordination, and every report of an escape. "The runaways are numer¬
ous and bold,” Kate Stone confided to her diary. "We live on a mine that
the Negroes are suspected of an intention to spring on the fourth of next
month. The information may be true or false, but they are being well
watched in every section where there are any suspects. Our faith is in
God.” 133

Nor were the fears of white men and women entirely illusory; they
could on occasion assume a terrible reality. The war was not even a year
old when Mary Chesnut heard that her cousin—Betsey Witherspoon of
Society Hill—had been found dead in her bed, although she had been "quite
well” the previous night. Two days later, the frightening news reached
Mary Chesnut that her cousin had met a violent death. "I broke down;
horror and amazement was too much for me. Poor cousin Betsey Wither¬
spoon was murdered! She did not die peacefully in her bed, as we supposed,
but was murdered by her own people, her Negroes.” With the arrest of two
house servants, the details began to emerge. On the day of the murder, Mrs.
Witherspoon’s son (who resided nearby) had charged several of his moth¬
er’s slaves with misusing and breaking some of the household china while
giving a party in their mistress’s absence, and he promised to return the
next day to give them a severe thrashing. Although Mrs. Witherspoon had
interceded on their behalf, thinking it "too late to begin discipline now,”
that news had not reached the slaves, one of whom allegedly told the
others: "Mars’ John more than apt to do what he say he will do, but you
all follow what I say and he’ll have something else to think of beside
stealing and breaking glass and china. If ole Marster was alive now, what
would he say to talk of whipping us!” That night, the slaves methodically
carried out the murder, smothering Betsey Witherspoon so as to make it
appear like a natural death.

News of the murder forced Mary Chesnut to reexamine many of her
previous assumptions about the "placid, docile, kind and obedient” slaves
she had known. "Hitherto I have never thought of being afraid of Negroes.
I had never injured any of them; why should they want to hurt me? Two
thirds of my religion consists in trying to be good to Negroes, because they
are so in our power, and it would be so easy to be the other thing.” But as

"The Faithful Slave”

of this day, she confessed, "I feel that the ground is cut away from under
my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done Cousin
Betsey Witherspoon?” While Mary Chesnut and her sister, Kate Williams,
sat up late that night and discussed the murder, Kate’s maid ("a strong-
built, mulatto woman ... so clever she can do anything”) dragged a mat¬
tress into the room and insisted that she spend the night with her mistress.
"You ought not to stay in a room by yourself these times,” she told her.
"Missis, as I have a soul to be saved, I will keep you safe. I will guard you.”
When the maid left for more bedding, Kate turned to her sister and ex¬
claimed, "For the life of me, I cannot make up my mind. Does she mean
to take care of me, or to murder me?” Unable to sleep, whether because of
the murder or the maid’s presence, or both, Kate went into her sister s
bedroom, and the two women tried to comfort each other, both of them
haunted by "the thought of those black hands strangling and smothering
Mrs. Witherspoon’s grey head under the counterpane.” One month later,
the details of the murder remained as vivid in Mary Chesnut’s mind as if
it had occurred the day before. "That innocent old lady and her grey hair
moved them not a jot. Fancy how we feel. I am sure I will never sleep again
without this nightmare of horror haunting me.... If they want to kill us,
they can do it when they please, they are noiseless as panthers. And yet,
she confided to her diary, although "we ought to be grateful that anyone
of us is alive,... nobody is afraid of their own Negroes. I find everyone, like
myself, ready to trust their own yard. I would go down on the plantation
tomorrow and stay there even if there were no white person in twenty
miles. My Molly and all the rest I believe would keep me as safe as I should
be in the Tower of London.”

But as she had feared, the specter of Mrs. Witherspoon’s death re¬
mained with them, manifesting itself in different ways at different times.
There was the day, for example, when Mary Chesnut s mother-in-law had
"bored” her with incessant talk about "the transcendant virtues of her
colored household”; that night, the woman suddenly warned everyone at
the dinner table not to touch their soup: "It is bitter. There is something
wrong about it!” The family tried to calm her and continued with their
meal, while the black waiters "looked on without change of face.” Kate
whispered to her sister, "It is cousin Betsey’s fate. She is watching every
trifle, and is terrified.” Afterwards, Kate told Mary of a Dr. Keith, "one of
the kindest of men and masters,” who had discovered one day that his
slaves were slowly trying to poison him and had thrown a cup of tainted
tea in the face of a suspected servant; the next morning, the doctor was
found with his throat cut. "Mrs. Witherspoon’s death,” Mary Chesnut
noted, "has clearly driven us all wild.” On Christmas Day 1861, she duly
recorded that the slaves charged with the murder of her cousin had been
hanged. That same day, the servants rushed in with cries of "Merry Christ¬
mas” and "Christmas Gift.” "I covered my face and wept.”

Despite the confidence she still reposed in her own servants, Mary
Chesnut began to entertain doubts about what she might expect of them

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

in the future. Nearly a year after Mrs. Witherspoon’s death, with all the
terror that had generated, she found herself reading a book about the
Sepoy Mutiny in India, in which the Bengal Army had turned upon its
British officers.

Who knows what similar horrors may lie in wait for us? When I saw the
siege of Lucknow in that little theatre at Washington, what a thrill of
terror ran through me as those yellow and black brutes came jumping
over the parapets! Their faces were like so many of the same sort at home.

To be sure, John Brown had faded to fire their hearts here, and they saw
no cause to rise and bum and murder us all, like the women and children
were treated in the Indian Mutiny. But how long would they resist the
seductive and irresistible call: "Rise, kill, and be free!

It was precisely an incident like the Witherspoon murder, no matter
how isolated, no matter how exceptional within the full record of slave
behavior, that prompted white men and women, while publicly praising the
exemplary behavior of their blacks, to reflect upon the combustible and
unpredictable nature of a society in which the most devoted, the most
pampered, the most humble slaves could strike terror and fear into a
family whose confidence they commanded. Despite the accumulating evi¬
dence of betrayal, most slaveholders might have readily agreed that the
faithful slave still constituted the vast majority of the black population;
they could, as one Virginian did, dismiss any other thought from their
minds.

Were not the negroes perfectly content and happy? Had I not often talked
to them on the subject? Had not every one of them told me repeatedly
that they loved "old Marster” better than anybody in the world, and
would not have freedom if he offered it to them? Of course they had,—
many and many a time. And that settled it.

But how could anyone be certain that the exception was not on his own
plantation or in his own household? That was the essential problem, and
it had plagued the white South for generations. Far more terrifying than
Nat Turner and his "deluded and drunken handful of followers,” a Virginia
legislator declared in 1832, was "the suspicion eternally attached to the
slave himself, the suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family,
that the same bloody deed could be acted over at any time and in any place,
that the materials for it were spread through the land and always ready
for a like explosion.” That was no less true in 1861 than it had been thirty
years before. 135

Arid there appeared to be no way to resolve this dilemma. Many a
master was driven to sleepless nights in his attempt to penetrate behind
the masks of his blacks, attaching significance to nearly every movement
or word, and perhaps even more significance to their silence or apparent

"The Faithful Slave”

indifference. The meekest, the most passive, the most submissive slaves
could unsettle a household. The very appearance of fidelity was sometimes
suspect. "They carry it too far,” Mary Chesnut had written of her servants
on the first day of the war. Not until nearly two years later did she begin
to discern changes in them, and even then only in her father s butler.
Although he remained "inscrutably silent” about the war, she sensed a
difference. "I taught him to read as soon as I could read myself, perched
on his knife board; but he won’t look at me now. He looks over my head,
he scents freedom in the air.... He is the first Negro that I have felt a
change in.” 136

The approach of the Union Army would raise new concerns for white
families but the traditional fears remained paramount. "I am afraid of the
lawless Yankee soldiers,” a Virginia woman confessed, "but that is nothing
to my fear of the negroes if they should rise against us.

Slaves were no less apprehensive, and their concern was by no means
limited to what they might expect from an invading army made up largely
of whites. The Civil War would not last forever, a Texas slave advised his
son, but "our forever was going to be spent living among the Southerners,
after they got licked.” 138

Chapter Two

BLACK LIBERATORS

Now we sogers are men—men de first time in our lives . Now we can look
our old masters in de face. They used to sell and whip us, and we did
not dare say one word. Now we ain't afraid, if they meet us, to run the
bayonet through them.

—SERGEANT PRINCE RIVERS,

1ST SOUTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEERS,

UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS 1

Lieutenant, de old flag neber did wave quite right. There was something
wrong about it,—there wasn't any star in it for the black man. Perhaps
there was in those you made in de North; but, when they got down here,
the sun was so hot, we couldn't see it. But, since the war, it's all right.
The black man has his star: it is the big one in the middle.

—TOM TAYLOR,

UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS 2

How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypoc-
risy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals,
only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected
the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed
white men; and behold, he was a man.

—w. E. B. DU BOIS 3

O n April 12,1864, George W. Hatton found cause for celebration and
reflection. Three years had passed since Confederate batteries opened
fire on Fort Sumter, and he could only marvel at the changes which had
taken place in his own life and in the lives of his people. "Though the
Government openly declared that it did not want the negroes in this con-
flict, he noted, I look around me and see hundreds of colored men armed
and ready to defend the Government at any moment; and such are my
feelings, that I can only say, the fetters have fallen—our bondage is over.”
Hatton was a sergeant in Company C of the 1st Regiment, United States
Colored Troops. The regimental chaplain—among the first black men ever
so designated—was Henry McNeal Turner, a native of South Carolina but
most recently pastor of the Israel Bethel Church in Washington, D.C.

Black Liberators

Encamped near New Bern, North Carolina, the regiment awaited the or¬
ders that would take them into Virginia for what promised to be the final
assault on the Confederacy. To many of the soldiers in this regiment, it all
seemed incredible. "Who would not celebrate this day?” Sergeant Hatton
asked. "What has the colored man done for himself in the past three years?
Why, sir, he has proved ... that he is a man.”

Less than a month later, Hatton’s regiment reached Wilson’s Landing,
only a few miles from Jamestown, where (as the sergeant duly noted) some
264 years earlier "the first sons of Africa” had been landed on American
soil. The region took on a special meaning, too, for several of the soldiers
in the regiment who had labored as slaves there. The memories they re¬
tained of those years were no doubt revived when several black women
entered the camp, still bearing the marks of a severe whipping recently
administered to them. While out on a foraging mission the next day, the
soldiers captured the man who had meted out that punishment—"a Mr.
Clayton, a noted reb in this part of the country, and from his appearance,
one of the F.F.V.’s [First Families of Virginia].” Before an obviously ap¬
preciative audience, which included the black women he had whipped, the
slaveholder was tied to a tree and stripped of his clothes; William Harris,
one of his former slaves before fleeing to enlist in the Union Army, took
up a whip and lashed him some twenty times, "bringing the blood from his
loins at every stroke, and not forgetting to remind the gentleman of days
gone by.” The whip was then handed over to the black women, who "one
after another,” as Sergeant Hatton afterward wrote, "came up and gave
him a like number, to remind him that they were no longer his, but safely
housed in Abraham’s bosom, and under the protection of the Star Spangled
Banner, and guarded by their own patriotic, though once down-trodden
race.”

That night, Sergeant George Hatton tried to sum up his impressions
of this almost unreal experience. He confessed that he was at a loss for the
proper words. "Oh, that I had the tongue to express my feelings while
standing upon the banks of the James river, on the soil of Virginia, the
mother state of slavery, as a witness of such a sudden reverse! The day is
clear, the fields of grain are beautiful, and the birds are singing sweet
melodious songs, while poor Mr. C. is crying to his servants for mercy.” 4

The war to save the Union had become, for scores of black people at
least, nothing less than a war of liberation. This far-reaching change in the
nature of the Civil War, like emancipation itself, had been achieved neither
quickly nor easily.

When the Civil War broke out, Frederick Douglass, a black abolitionist
leader and former slave, immediately called for the enlistment of slaves
and free blacks into a "liberating army” that would carry the banner of

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

emancipation through the South. Within thirty days, Douglass believed,
10,000 black soldiers could be assembled. "One black regiment alone would
be, in such a war, the full equal of two white ones. The very fact of color
in this case would be more terrible than powder and balls. The slaves would
leam more as to the nature of the conflict from the presence of one such
regiment, than from a thousand preachers.” But the North was not yet
prepared to endorse such a revolutionary move, any more than it could
conceive of the necessity or wisdom of embracing a policy of emancipation. 5

Along with most northern whites, even ardent Union patriots tended
to view the enlistment of blacks into the armed forces as an incendiary act
contrary to accepted modes of warfare and "shocking to our sense of hu¬
manity.” The specters of Nat Turner and Santo Domingo were regarded as
sufficient warnings of what might happen if armed black men were un¬
leashed upon white slaveholding families. The history of slave insurrec¬
tions, a Republican senator from Ohio reminded his colleagues,
demonstrated that "Negro warfare” inevitably produced "all the scenes of
desolation attendant upon savage warfare.” Besides, a border state con¬
gressman told his constituents, "to confess our inability to put down this
rebellion without calling to our aid these semi-barbaric hordes” would
prove "derogatory to the manhood of 20 millions of freemen.” 6

Early conceptions of the Civil War as "a white man's war” with limited
objectives were not the only deterrent to raising a black army. Even if black
enlistments should be deemed desirable, few whites believed that black
men possessed the necessary technical skills, intelligence, and courage to
become effective soldiers. "If we were to arm them,” President Lincoln
conceded in September 1862, "I fear that in a few weeks the arms would
be in the hands of the rebels.” No less threatening to many whites was the
possibility that they were wrong and that the black man might actually
prove himself in combat. "If you make him the instrument by which your
battles are fought, the means by which your victories are won,” an Ohio
congressman warned, "you must treat him as a victor is entitled to be
treated, with all decent and becoming respect.” The use of black troops also
threatened to undermine the morale of white Union soldiers, many of
whom recoiled at the thought of serving alongside black comrades. "[I]t
Will raise a rebelion in the army that all the abolisionist this Side of hell
Could not Stop,” one Union soldier predicted. "[T]he Southern Peopel are
rebels to the government but they are White and God never intended a
nigger to put white people Down.” 7

The exclusion of blacks from the armed forces, like President Lincoln's
reluctance to make emancipation a war objective, worked only so long as
the government and northern whites remained confident of their ability to
win the war. In the aftermath of Fort Sumter, with patriotic whites rally¬
ing to the flag, there seemed little reason to doubt that the rebellion would
be easily and speedily crushed. Eighteen months later, the expected quick
victory had not materialized, the war still raged with no end in sight, and
a weary, frustrated North was forced to think about a different kind of war.
Mounting casualties, the return home of the maimed and wounded, the

Black Liberators

ala rming increase in desertions (more than 100,000 away without leave at
the end of 1862), and the growing difficulty in obtaining enlistments en¬
couraged a reassessment of the military value of emancipation and black
recruitment. 'If a bob-tail dog can stick a bayonet on his tail, and back up
against a rebel and kill him, I will take the dog and sleep with him,” a
Union officer declared, "and if a nigger will do the same, I’ll do the same
by him. Ill sleep with any thing that will kill a rebel.” Although this may
have been a curious kind of recognition, the argument gained increasing
acceptance with every casualty list. To enlist blacks was to preserve the
more valuable lives of white men. The best men of the North were dying
in the swamps of the South, an officer observed, and this was a loss the
nation could ill afford. "[Y]ou can’t replace these men, but if a nigger dies,
all you have to do is send out and get another one.” 8

The same Administration that had summarily rejected black volun¬
teers at the outset of tHe war began in mid-1862 to consider the employ¬
ment of blacks in the armed forces. The initial proposals contemplated
using such troops primarily for menial labor and for garrison duty in areas
deemed unfit for white men, such as the malarial regions along the Gulf
of Mexico and the Mississippi River. The advantages of deploying blacks in
these ways were obvious. "The blacks,” said the New York Times , "thor¬
oughly acclimated, will be saved from the risks of the climate, while in the
well-defined limit of fortifications they will be restrained from the commis¬
sion of those revengeful excesses which are the bug-aboos of the Southern
people.” In a series of articles on "Colored Troops,” a columnist for the
Christian Recorder, the voice of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
seemed to share the prevailing belief that blacks were "especially adapted
to service in the South” because they were less susceptible to diseases
which easily felled white men. When Vicksburg surrendered, the black
columnist noted, the hospitals were filled with southern white soldiers
suffering from malarial diseases and fevers "from which colored men are
almost exempt.” Citing the many advantages of black troops, he welcomed
the proposal to use them to guard prisoners of war and to protect garrisons
in the occupied areas. Such duty, he thought, would be especially "pleas¬
ant” to the emancipated slaves, enabling them "to stand guard over those
who have so long abused the power they held over them.” 9

To resolve the doubts which persisted about the military capabilities
of black men, some suggested that they first be tested in battle agai n st the
Indians. If the experiment proved successful, black troops could then be
deployed for combat duty in the South. Nothing came of this proposal, and
it won little favor among blacks themselves. "I am very doubtful whether
the negro could display his bravery as well against his co-sufferer, as he
could against his enemy,” wrote Henry M. Turner, the black clergyman.
"Like us,” the Indian has been "scattered and peeled.” How could blacks,
of all people, share in a deliberate policy of racial extermination? The
Indians, Turner observed, "cherished no special hatred against my race,”
and the "scalping knife and tomahawk were not shaped nor moulded to
injure us.” Rather than wage war on the Indians, Turner suggested that

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

b la ck people might well learn to emulate their bravery. "If we had one half
of the Indian spunk, to-day slavery would have been among the things of
the past.” Whatever the merits of Turner’s argument, blacks had been used
to fight Indians in the past, and they would do so again in the postwar
ftiHian wars, but to have employed them for this purpose in 1863 must have
struck some blacks as a perversion of priorities. 10

While the President refused to alter his position on emancipation and
black enlistments, the Union Navy was using "contraband” slaves as ap¬
prentice seamen and the Army began to employ them extensively as labor¬
ers and officers’ servants. Limited and unauthorized attempts, moreover,
had been undertaken in Kansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina to arm,
drill, and use black soldiers. After General Benjamin Butler overcame his
initial reluctance to enlist blacks, three regiments made up of free colored
militiamen (previously organized by Confederate authorities) and even
larger numbers of freed slaves were organized in Louisiana. With uncon¬
cealed enthusiasm, General David Hunter sought to mobilize blacks in the
Sea Islands of South Carolina, explaining to the War Department that he
had recruited no "fugitive slaves” but "a fine regiment of loyal persons
whose late masters are fugitive rebels.” The Hunter project proved short¬
lived, largely because the government refused to recognize or assist it in
any way, and aggressive recruitment tactics had antagonized both the
freedmen and many of the northern white missionaries and teachers sta¬
tioned there. 11

Responding to new military reverses and stalemates, the War Depart¬
ment in August 1862 authorized the recruitment of a slave regiment in the
Union Army—the 1st South Carolina Volunteers. In compliance with the
proviso that white men serve as officers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson
was appointed to command the regiment. Appropriately, this New England
intellectual was also a fervid abolitionist and an old friend of John Brown.
He eagerly accepted the commission, considering it a challenge that might
well influence the entire course of the war and the destiny of black people
in the United States. "I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known
and loved John Brown too well,” he later wrote, "not to feel a thrill of
joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to
be.” 12

The 1st South Carolina Volunteers drew its recruits largely from the
Sea Islands freedmen. Higginson insisted that his white officers treat the
soldiers with respect, refer to them by their full names and never as "nig¬
ger,” and eschew any "degrading punishments.” After assuming command
in November 1862, his first impressions were favorable, though heavily
overladen with a condescending paternalism that characterized his New
England contemporaries’ views of black people. He marveled at the reli¬
gious devotions, songs, and "strange antics” that emanated from "this
mysterious race of grown-up children.” He admired their inexhaustible
"love of the spelling book.” He was impressed by their aptitude for drill and
discipline and their capacity for imitativeness. To Higginson, they were

Black Liberators

always "a simple and lovable people, whose graces seem to come by nature,
and whose vices by training.” He came to love them both as a military
commander and as a father figure. ”1 think it is partly from my own
notorious love of children that I like these people so well.” The immediate
task at hand, as he interpreted his mission, was to educate these "perpetual
children, docile, gay, and lovable,” to manhood and to mobilize them into
an effective fighting force. He was fully confident of success. 13

Against a background of military setbacks, mounting casualty lists,
and unfilled recruitment quotas, President Lincoln issued in September
1862 a Preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation which stipulated that
on January 1, 1863, in those states or portions of states still engaged in
rebellion, the slaves would be "forever free.” Not only were Tennessee and
the loyal border slave states thereby excluded but also the slaves in desig¬
nated portions of Louisiana, Virginia, and West Virginia. Limited though
it was and justified only as "a fit and necessary war measure,” the Procla¬
mation marked a strategic shift in the President’s thinking about the
military uses of black men. Henceforth, he decreed, they would be accepted
into the armed forces for garrison duty and to man naval vessels. This fell
far short of a commitment to a black army, but the wording was sufficiently
vague to invite a variety of interpretations and proposals. "The best thing
in the proclamation,” wrote a northern lawyer, "is the annunciation that
the southern garrisons are to be Negros. We ought to have our standing
army (after the rebellion) composed exclusively of Negros—a regular Janis¬
sary Corps, who propagate & recruit themselves.” The news was greeted
with far less enthusiasm in the Union Army camps in the South, where
white troops needed to weigh the advantages of combat replacements and
labor relief against deeply entrenched racial attitudes. "The truth is,” one
army private wrote, "none of our soldiers seem to like the idea of arming
the Negros. Our boys say this [is] a white mans war and the Negro has no
business in it.” 14

After the Administration committed itself to the military employment
of blacks as soldiers, the changes came so rapidly that Frederick Douglass
could only describe them as "vast and startling.” Less than three weeks
after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, the 1st South
Carolina Volunteers marched through the streets of Beaufort, with a white
regimental band leading the way. "And when dat band wheel in before us,
and march on,” a black sergeant remarked afterwards, "my God! I quit dis
world altogeder.” The astonishment of the native whites at this awesome
spectacle was matched only by the obvious pride manifested in the eyes of
the black soldiers, their faces set rigidly to the front. "We didn’t look to de
right nor to de leff,” one of them recalled. "I didn’t see notin’ in Beaufort.
Eb’ry step was worth a half a dollar.” Several weeks later, they made their
initial contact with the enemy, and Colonel Higginson was deeply im¬
pressed. "Nobody knows anything about these men who has not seen them
in battle. I find that I myself knew nothing. There is a fierce energy about
them beyond anything of which I have ever read, unless it be the French

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Zouaves. It requires the strictest discipline to hold them in hand.” There
could no longer be any doubt in Higginson’s mind that "the key to the
successful prosecution of this war” lay in the unlimited use of black troops.

Their superiority lies simply in the fact that they know the country,
which White troops do not; and, moreover, that they have peculiarities
of temperament, position, and motive, which belong to them alone. In¬
stead of leaving their homes and families to fight, they are fighting for
their homes and families; and they show the resolution and sagacity
which a personal purpose gives. It would have been madness to attempt
with the bravest White troops what I have successfully accomplished
with Black ones. 15

The "vast and startling” changes manifested themselves throughout
the occupied South. While black troops marched in Beaufort, a regiment
recruited largely from fugitive slaves out of Arkansas and Missouri went
into combat as the Kansas 1st Colored Volunteers Infantry. "I believe the
Negro may just as well become food for powder as my son,” the commander
of this regiment had previously declared. In the lower Mississippi Valley,
meanwhile, the thousands of slaves crowding the Union camps were being
mobilized into military units, and in Louisiana the previously organized
free colored and slave regiments were augmented despite bitter objections
from native whites. "When we enlisted,” one black soldier wrote, "we were
hooted at in the streets of New Orleans as a rabble of armed plebeians &
cowards.” On May 27,1863, two of the Louisiana black regiments joined
in the assault on Port Hudson, a major Confederate stronghold on the lower
Mississippi River. That morning, Henry T. Johns, a white private, wrote:
"I am glad to know that on our right and on our left are massed negro
regiments, who, this day, are to show if the inspiration of Freedom will lift
the serf to the level of the man. Whoever else may flinch, I trust they will
stand firm and baptize their hopes in the mingled blood of master and slave.
Then we will give them a share in our nationality, if God has no separate
nationality in store for them.” Although the attack was repulsed with
heavy losses, the blacks had proven themselves in battle, and a Union
officer confessed that his "prejudices” in regard to black troops had been
dispelled in a single day. Private Johns thought, too, that the question of
black troops had been firmly settled, "and many a proud master found in
death that freedom had made his slave his superior.” To many observers,
in fact, Port Hudson was the turning point in white recognition of the
Negro as a combat soldier. And when two regiments made up of freedmen
successfully resisted a Confederate assault on Milliken’s Bend the follow¬
ing month, even the Confederate officer commanding the attack was duly
impressed. "This charge was resisted by the negro portion of the enemy’s
force with considerable obstinacy, while the white or true Yankee portion
ran like whipped curs almost as soon as the charge was ordered.” 16

Six months after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than thirty

Black Liberators

black regiments had been organized, camps had been established to receive
and train them, recruiting was taking place almost everywhere, and sev¬
eral units had already participated in combat action. That was only the
beginning. By December 1863 over 50,000 blacks had been enrolled in the
Union Army, and the President was assured that this number would rap¬
idly increase as Federal troops moved deeper into the Confederacy. Before
the end of the war, more than 186,000 would be enlisted, including 24,000
in Louisiana, 17,800 in Mississippi, and 20,000 in Tennessee. The President
even overcame his initial reluctance to organizing black regiments in the
loyal border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland. Although he
tried to restrict enlistments in those states to the slaves of disloyal masters,
army recruiters made little or no effort to enforce such discrimination, and
the promise of freedom to enlistees and their families went far, in fact, to
undermine the entire institution of slavery in those regions excluded from
the Emancipation Proclamation. "I claim not to have controlled events, but
confess plainly that events have controlled me,” President Lincoln wrote
to a Kentucky newspaper. "Now, at the end of three years struggle the
nation's condition is not what either party or any man devised, or ex¬
pected." Christopher A. Fleetwood, a Baltimore free black who had enlisted
in the Union Army, voiced almost the same sentiments when he noted in
his diary at the end of 1863: "This year has brought about many changes
that at the beginning were or would have been thought impossible. The
close of the year finds me a soldier for the cause of my race." 17

The transformation of public sentiment on the enlistment of blacks
pointed up the extent to which military necessity managed to surmount
prevailing racial attitudes. The passage of the Draft Act in March 1863,
reflecting as it did the desperate need for more troops, broke down still
further the remaining objections to blacks as soldiers. For many war-weary
Northerners, especially those who were now subject to military conscrip¬
tion, the arming of the black man suddenly took on a new meaning. The
immediate and widespread popularity of a song ascribed to Irish Ameri¬
cans testified not so much to its melodic quality as to its persuasive logic:

Some tell us ’tis a burnin shame
To make the naygers fight;

An' that the thrade of bein' kilt
Belongs but to the white;

But as for me, upon my soul!

So liberal are we here.

I'll let Sambo be murthered instead of myself
On every day in the year. 18

Capitalizing on the apparent changes in public sentiment, black
spokesmen and newspapers in the North insisted that the very nature of
the Civil War had been fundamentally altered. "The strife now waging is
not between North and South," a black meeting declared in mid-1863, but

72 BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

between "barbarism and freedom—civilization and slavery.” For the North
to lose this war would "rivet our chains still firmer” and seal "our perpet¬
ual disfranchisement.” The most effective remedy for what ailed blacks,
the meeting resolved, was "warm lead and cold steel, duly administered by
two hundred thousand black doctors.” Now that the Civil War promised to
liberate the slaves, the necessity for defeating the Confederacy was coupled
with the urgency of black people helping to strike the decisive blow and
setting themselves free. "Liberty won by white men,” Douglass main¬
tained, "would lose half its luster.” But by breaking the chains themselves,
he told prospective black volunteers, "you will stand more erect, walk more
assured, feel more at ease, and be less liable to insult than you ever were
before.” Few welcomed this opportunity more readily than did many of
those who had only recently been slaves. "A year ago, where was we?”
asked a soldier with the 7th Regiment Corps d’Afrique. "We was down in
de dark land of Slavery. And now where are we? We are free men, and
soldiers of de United States. And what have we to do? We have to fight de
rebels so dat we never more be slaves.” 19

Although emancipation did not directly affect northern blacks, they
were urged to act upon the sympathy they had long expressed for their
enslaved southern brethren. Participation in the war, moreover, could not
help but improve their own precarious place in American society and break
down the barriers white Northerners had erected against them. "There
never was, nor there never will be, a better opportunity for colored men to
get what they want, than now,” the Washington, D.C., correspondent of the
Christian Recorder wrote in June 1863. "Suppose,” he asked, "500,000
colored men were under arms, would not the nation really be under our
arms, too? Would the nation refuse us our rights in such a condition?
Would it refuse us our vote? Would it deny us any thing when its salvation
was hanging upon us? No! never!” Whether in the North or in the South,
then, the prospects for black Americans seemed inseparable from their
military exploits—the way to the ballot box, into the classroom, and onto
the streetcar was through the battlegrounds of the Confederacy. The rifle
and the bayonet, Douglass insisted, would speak more forcefully for civil
rights than any "parchment guarantees.”

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him
get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in
his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has
earned the right to citizenship in the United States.

To learn the use of arms, moreover, was "to become familiar with the
means of securing, protecting and defending your own liberty.... When it
is once found that black men can give blows as well as take them, men will
find more congenial employment than pounding them.” 20

Once an advocate of nonresistance and only recently a major critic of
President Lincoln for refusing to endorse emancipation, Frederick Doug-

Black Liberators

lass agreed in early 1863 to become a recruiting agent for the United States
Army. 'There is something ennobling in the possession of arms,” he told

a meeting in Philadelphia, "and we of all other people in the world stand
in need of their ennobling influence.” Having undertaken the mission of
enlisting blacks in the newly formed 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Doug¬
lass toured western New York seeking volunteers. "In Rochester,” he wrote
in April 1863, "I have thirteen names, my son heading the list.” 21

The Civil War provided Americans with various opportunities to exploit
the nation's military needs for personal profit and advantage. That white
men should have used the recruitment of black regiments for such pur¬
poses is not altogether surprising. With the end of racial restrictions on
enlistments, state and local bounties and military conscription instantly
made black men valuable and marketable commodities. Capitalizing on the
law which permitted a draftee to send a person in his place, the "substitute
broker” viewed the black man as a likely candidate; his lowly economic
position often made him easier and cheaper to purchase, some were intimi¬
dated into enlisting, and the broker's commission for finding a "substitute”
justified whatever method he needed to employ. The practice became so
widespread, in fact, that the War Department finally interceded and ruled
that Negroes could substitute only for other Negroes. That decision not
only forced brokers to look elsewhere but depressed the price which some
blacks had been asking (and obtaining) for a substitute enlistment. 22

Mixing patriotism and personal profit in varying degrees, more than
a thousand "state agents” combed the cities and countryside, particularly
in the occupied South, for prospective black soldiers. The incentive was a
new congressional law, enacted on July 4,1864, which provided that blacks
recruited in the Confederate states could be credited to the draft quotas of
the loyal states. Acting sometimes as emissaries of northern governors and
authorized to offer handsome bounties, the "state agents” used every con¬
ceivable method to obtain recruits and often defrauded them of the prom¬
ised bonus. The number of military officers who accepted bribes to turn
over slave refugees "to particular agents” will never be known. But one
court-martial trial revealed how a Massachusetts white man had formed
a thriving business by purchasing blacks in New Bern, North Carolina,
from a Union officer, inducting them into the Army, and then crediting
them to the quotas of various Massachusetts towns in proportion to the
amount of money the townspeople had contributed for bounty payments.
The agent in this case testified that his share of the profits had amounted
to $10,000. Stories such as these prompted one Massachusetts officer to
express his revulsion at "this traffic of New England towns in the bodies
of wretched negroes, bidding against each other for these miserable beings

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

who are deluded, and if some of the affidavits I have in my office are true,
tortured into military service.” 23

Employing both persuasion and strong-arm methods, the Army sought
most of its black recruits in the occupied South. With "soul-stirring music
and floating banners,” a correspondent reported from Maryland, recruiting
parties would march through a neighborhood and "sweep it clean of its
bla ck warriors.” Wherever the Union Army was in control, recruitment
offices were opened and specially designated agents (or raiding parties
made up of a dozen men and a noncommissioned officer) were dispatched
to the countryside to round up potential recruits. The usual procedure was
for the agent to enter a town, address a hastily convened meeting of local
blan k s , tell them what the President had done for the colored people,
display the attractive recruitment poster, and promise anyone who joined
both financial and moral compensation. Appointed to recruit black troops
in northern Alabama, James T. Ayers found himself frequently forced to
adopt direct personal pleading. "I want your man,” he told a black woman
who had urged her husband not to enlist. "You ought to be a slave as long
as you live and him too if he is so mean as not to help get his Liberty.” Far
more effective, in some instances, was the use of black soldiers to obtain
additional recruits. Not only were black troops frequently dispatched with
instructions to enlist any able-bodied slaves they could locate but they
might be necessary to protect the recruits from white retaliation. The black
soldier also often appeared as the featured speaker at meetings of his
people, and invariably he would appeal to the race pride and manhood of
his audience. "Don’t you remember how afraid they used to be that we
would rise?” Jerry Sullivan asked a Nashville gathering in 1863.

And you know we would, too, if we could. (Cries of "that’s so.”) I ran away
two years ago.... Come, boys, let’s get some guns from Uncle Sam, and
go coon hunting; shooting those gray back coons that go poking about the
country now a days. (Laughter.)... Don’t ask your wife, for if she is a wife
worth having she will call you a coward for asking her. (Applause, and
waving of handkerchiefs by the ladies.) 24

The job of a recruiting agent in the South was beset with difficulties,
frustrations, and personal danger. The whites regarded him as an incendi¬
ary (he proposed, after all, to arm black men), and slaveholders were natu¬
rally incensed by anyone who threatened to make soldiers of their laborers.
Unless accompanied by a detachment of troops, both the agent and his
prospective recruits might find it difficult to return to the nearest Union
camp. In Kentucky, the provost marshal enumerated cases in which slaves
had been whipped, mutilated, and murdered for trying to enlist and re¬
cruiting agents had been "caught, stripped, tied to a tree and cowhided”
before being driven out of town. What made the work of the agent all the
more exasperating was his frequent lack of success in obtaining many
enlistments. The reports of white violence no doubt discouraged prospec-

Black Liberators

tive volunteers but this may not adequately explain the disturbing report
of a Federal official that in nearly four months of recruitment work, more
than a thousand men had been employed to enlist a total of 2,831 blacks.
More likely, many blacks simply shared with their white countrymen an
aversion to the hardships and risks of military service. 'The negroes re¬
indicate their claim to humanity,” an officer wrote from South Carolina,
"by shirking the draft in every possible way; acting exactly like white men
under similar circumstances.” He conceded, however, that the black con¬
script was less likely to desert than hi s white counterpart. Some recruiting
agents came away disgusted with the refusal of blacks to yield to their
appeals. Initially enthusiastic about his recruiting mission in northern
Alabama, James T. Ayers, who had been an antislavery Methodist
preacher in Illinois, urged blacks to accept the responsibility for liberating
their brethren from bondage. But his best efforts did not produce the
results he had expected, and less than a year after his appointment Ayers
was a thoroughly disillusioned man. "I feel now much inclined to go to
Nashville and throw up my papers and Resign, as I am hartily sick of
Coaxing niggers to be Soaldiers Any more. They are so trifleing and mean
they dont Deserve to be free.” 25

After making their way to the Union camps, many slave refugees
eagerly volunteered for military service, believing that this act would con¬
firm their freedom. The more reluctant blacks might be inducted anyway.
"It seems that pretty nearly all the refugees join the army,” a Federal
official wrote from South Carolina. "You wish to know whether the ref¬
ugees are kept in the guard house until they are willing to volunteer. I do
not know whether they are kept confined till they do volunteer but I know
that they always let them out when they do volunteer.” Increasingly, the
Army resorted to forcible impressment, though in some regions they would
try to balance the demand for recruits with the need to maintain planta¬
tion labor. The effectiveness of the recruitment campaign in the lower
Mississippi Valley rested partly on the insistence that slaves who had left
their masters should be forced to serve either as soldiers or as military
laborers; the methods employed by officers in this region were often ques¬
tionable but they achieved spectacular results. "The plan for 'persuading’
recruits,” one officer wrote from Memphis, "while it could hardly be called
the shot-gun policy was equally as convincing, and never failed to get the
'recruit/ ” The commissioner entrusted with raising black troops in Mary¬
land simply conceded that "no recruits can be had unless I send detach¬
ments to particular localities and compel them to volunteer.

Despite assurances to South Carolina blacks of voluntary enlistment,
freedmen in the Sea Islands region stood in perpetual fear of raiding par-
ties—often composed of black soldiers—which descended upon communi¬
ties and plantations in the dead of night to carry them away to nearby
military camps. "Not a man sleeps at night in the houses/ a missionary
teacher wrote, "except those too old to be taken. They have made a camp
somewhere and mean never to be caught.” Prospective recruits here and

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

elsewhere often hid out in the woods or swamps.for considerable periods
of time rather than be inducted into the Army. Having already experienced
forced separations from their loved ones, black women did not necessarily
look with favor upon similar disruptions undertaken by their professed
liberators; in South Carolina, women field workers attacked a black im¬
pressment party with their hoes, shouting that white men were too fright¬
ened to fight and only wanted blacks to do their dirty work for them. The
womens all hold back der husbands,” a black sergeant complained "didn’t
want them to go sogering, ’cause they get killed. Women worse than the
men, and some hide the men in the woods.... I feel shamed for our

^"impressment of Sea Islands freedmen not only alarmed the intended
victims and forced many of them into hiding but provoked some furious
protests from the white teachers and missionaries who had come there
from the North to ease their transition to freedom. The coercive recruit¬
ment practices reminded them, they said, of what they had only recently
criticized in their indictments of slavery. What was impressment, after all,
if not the forcible enslavement of blacks, albeit under different auspices?
After Union troops had carried away still another black man during the
night, one missionary observed that only recently Confederate soldiers had
shot and killed black men for refusing to go along with them. How were
the freedmen, she asked, to know the difference? "It strikes me as very
important,” a high-r ankin g Federal official wrote to a Union officer, to
avoid all things likely to impair the self respect of the emancipees. Fresh
from slavery, if they enlist freely they must feel themselves very differ¬
ent persons from what they would regard themselves if forced into the

1 .

Despite a flurry of protests, army commanders defended their conduct
not only on the grounds of military necessity but as in the best interests
of the blacks. That recruitment had been progressing more slowly than
expected was only one reason why General Hunter wanted to impress all
blacks not regularly employed as officers’ servants or military laborers.
Military discipline, Hunter insisted, was the best way to lift these people
to "our hi gher civilization.” The slaves, moreover, could never adequately
appreciate freedom until they realized "the sacrifices which are its price.”
And finall y, he noted, the recruitment of black men made a servile insur¬
rection less likely. In defending the conduct of impressment parties in
Washington, D.C., a black resident singled out the contemptuous way in
which some of his people responded to recruitment appeals. When asked
to enlist, they would "make light” of the proposal and demand to know
"what am I going to fight for? this is a white man’s war,” and accompany
their response with verbal abuse. "Well, now,” the observer added, "the
colored soldiers think this is too much; they suffer enough at the hands of
the white race, without being buffeted by their own race, whose sympathies
should be in their behalf.” 2 *

Less coercive methods were employed in the North, where state gover-

Black Liberators

nors and patriotic citizens’ committees were initially responsible for
mounting recruitment campaigns. To mobilize support among northern
blacks, mass meetings were called, broadsides were circulated (the most
popular of which was written by Frederick Douglass), and the few black
newspapers sought to inculcate their readers with the obligations of black
men in a war of liberation. Although the Christian Recorder had initially
disapproved of the war and the resort to violence, it now urged black men
to take up arms for their country and race. "Shame on him who would hang
back at the call of his country,” the newspaper declared, in supporting the
efforts to raise a black regiment in Philadelphia. "Go with the view that
you will return freemen. And if you should never return, you will die with
the satisfaction of knowing that you have struck a blow for freedom, and
assisted in giving liberty to our race in the land of our birth.” 30

Critical to the raising of a black army in the North were, in fact, the
black recruitment agents. When Governor John A. Andrew of Massachu¬
setts was authorized in January 1863 to organize a Negro regiment, he
immediately recognized the far-reaching implications of his new responsi¬
bility. Since this would be the first black regiment raised in the North, he
thought the success or failure of the effort would "go far to elevate or to
depress the estimation in which the character of the Colored Americans
will be held throughout the World.” Although two companies were quickly
formed in Boston and New Bedford (including black men whom the gover¬
nor had been forced to reject at the outset of the war), there were insuffi¬
cient numbers of blacks in Massachusetts to make up an entire regiment.
The governor thereupon secured the support of a wealthy abolitionist who
agreed to help finance the enlistment of blacks throughout the North,
largely by employing as recruitment agents such leading black spokesmen
as Martin R. Delany, John Mercer Langston, John S. Rock, William Wells
Brown, Charles Lenox Remond, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick
Douglass. These were all familiar names in black abolitionism, most of
them had worked actively to eradicate racial discrimination in the North,
and several of them had only recently endorsed emigration to Haiti or
Central America before being dissuaded by the reality of an antislavery
war. "Action! Action! not criticism, is the plain duty of this hour,” Douglass
declared, in a broadside intended to attract blacks to the Massachusetts
regiment. "The iron gate of our prison stands half open. One gallant rush
from the North will fling it wide open, while four millions of our brothers
and sisters shall march out into liberty.” 31

The recruitment drive was highly successful. By May 1863, the 54th
Massachusetts Regiment, the most celebrated of the northern black regi¬
ments, was ready to leave Boston for Hilton Head, South Carolina, where
it had been ordered to report to General David Hunter. With some 20,000
cheering Bostonians lining the streets, and the regimental band playing
the John Brown anthem, the troops made their way to the Battery Wharf.
"Glory enough for one day; aye, indeed for a lifetime,” remarked William
C. Nell, a veteran black abolitionist. Frederick Douglass was there, not only

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

to view the results of his recruitment activities but to see off his two sons,
Lewis and Charles, who had been the first New York blacks to enlist in the
regiment. Martin R. Delany’s eighteen-year-old son, Toussaint L’Ouver-
ture Delany, had left his school in Canada to join the regiment. And on the
balcony of Wendell Phillips’ house, overlooking the parade, stood none
other than William Lloyd Garrison, who was observed resting his hand on
a bust of John Brown. 32

Two months later, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment made its famous
assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate stronghold situated at the entrance
to Charleston harbor. The attack was repulsed, with considerable loss of
life (Robert Shaw, the white regimental commander, was among those
killed), but black troops had fought valiantly. And that was what mattered.
"It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race,” proclaimed a New
York newspaper, "as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white
Yankees.” Even the enormous expenditure of black lives could be viewed
as a necessary sacrificial offering. "Do you not rejoice & exult in all that
praise that is lavished upon our brave colored troops even by Pro-slavery
papers?” abolitionist Angelina Grimke Weld asked Gerrit Smith. "I have
no tears to shed over their graves, because I see that their heroism is
working a great change in public opinion, forcing all men to see the sin &
shame of enslaving such men.” Two days after the battle, Lewis Douglass
informed Amelia Loguen, his future wife, that he had not been wounded.
"Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty
feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat,
which was a very hazardous undertaking. How I got out of that fight alive

I cannot tell, but I am here_Remember if I die I die in a good cause. I

wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this
war.” 33

With the successful organization of two Massachusetts regiments (the
surplus of volunteers for the 54th became the 55th Massachusetts Regi¬
ment), several northern states undertook to form similar contingents and
employed black leaders to find the necessary men. The enthusiasm which
brought about the Massachusetts regiments, however, proved to be less
contagious than had been expected. Although several thousand northern
blacks did respond to the call for military service, the anticipated stampede
to the recruitment offices failed to materialize. "Before an opportunity was
presented for them to do so,” a disillusioned black soldier told a gathering
of his people in Washington, D.C., "many of the black people were spoiling
for a fight—they were ready and anxious to die for their race—but now
whar are dey? What do you want Mr. Linkun to do—feed you on ice-cream?
Suppose these white men here were about to be drove into Slavery,
wouldn’t they fight? Certainly they would; but you—you would stand
tamely and let your hands be crossed behind your back, and told to go on
dar, nigger, without resisting it.” 34

If this disgruntled soldier had looked around him, he might have per¬
ceived why some blacks had declined to enlist. The Civil War had expanded

Black Liberators

economic opportunities, and black people shared to some extent in the
wartime prosperity. While a black resident of Washington, D.C., described
a substantial increase in black employment, a white Bostonian was com¬
plaining that "the blacks here are too comfortable to do anything more
than talk about freedom.” Nor did northern blacks feel as intensely that
inducement of freedom which moved their southern brethren to enlist in
far greater numbers; some insisted that they could serve their race more
effectively if they remained at home, where important campaigns also
needed to be waged. "I am pleased to learn that you were fortunate enough
to escape the draft,” William H. Parham, a black school principal in Cincin¬
nati, wrote to a prominent Philadelphia black leader, "as I believe you will
be able to do more for the race where you are than you could by going to
the battlefield. When this war is over, the next struggle will be against
prejudice, which is to be conquered by intellect and we shall need all the
talent that we have among us or can possibly command. Then will be your
time to be found in the thickest of the fight; where the battle rages fiercest
and the danger is most imminent.” When Parham himself was enrolled
under the Conscription Act and thereby made subject to the draft, he
searched desperately for some way to avoid military service. "Many have
escaped the enrollment,” he wrote, "but I am not one of the fortunate

ones_If I am drafted, I do not think I shall go.” Aside from his obvious

reluctance to serve in the Army, Parham had heard "discouraging” reports
that black soldiers were not being accorded the same pay, bounties, and
treatment as white recruits. 35

With the enlistment of black men, the question of how they would be
treated in the United States Army quickly surfaced. It was understood
from the outset that blacks would serve in separate regiments and be
commanded largely by white officers. But still other questions required
clarification, and some blacks demanded answers before committing their
services. "What are to be the immunities of the colored soldiers?” one black
newspaper asked. "Will they receive bounties, as well as the white? If they
are maimed for life, will they receive pensions from the Government? If
they are captured by the enemy, will they be treated as prisoners of war?
—or will they be hung up by the rebels, shot or quartered, as the case may
be, without redress?” 36 These were not easy questions to answer, and many
of the problems they raised were never satisfactorily resolved.

Although the War Department stipulated on several occasions that
black soldiers were entitled to the same pay and benefits accorded whites,
there was no legal basis for such promises. But most of the recruits had no
way of knowing this, and they generally assumed they would be treated
like other troops. After all, one black soldier wrote, "we were mustered in

been in the storm so long

as Massachusetts volunteers, not as the United States colored forces or as
military laborers”; moreover, Governor Andrew had promised them the
same treatment, in every respect, as the white volunteers receive. In the

appeals for enlistments, recruiters repeatedly assured blacks of the same
wages, rations, equipment, protection, bounties, and treatment as eiyoyed
by white troops. "I have assured myself on these points,” Frederick Doug¬
lass told prospective black recruits, "and can speak with authority. More
tVian twenty years unswerving devotion to our common cause, may give me
some humble claim to be trusted at this momentous crisis.” 37

The promises seemed sufficiently clear, and Douglass and other re¬
cruiters no doubt believed in them, but the equal treatment they insisted
upon never came to pass. And since such promises had comprised a consid¬
erable element of the recruitment appeals, initial disappointments had a
way of turning into a sense of betrayal. Substantial numbers of black
soldiers, mostly those recruited in the North, charged that they had been
deceived. "We were promised three hundred dollars bounty and thirteen
dollars a month, or whatever the white soldiers got,” a Pennsylvania sol¬
dier declared; "but, God help their poor lying souls! Now that they have us
where they want us, they have forgotten all their promises.” His complaint
was well grounded. Whatever the assurances upon enlisting, the experi¬
ence of the black soldier revealed a double standard in enlistment bounties,
benefits for dependents, promotions, pay, and time spent in fatigue duty.
And since blacks were called upon to perform the same duties as white
soldiers, these distinctions made no sense at all. "Do we not fill the same
r anks ?” asked one soldier. "Do we not cover the same space of ground? Do
we not take up the same length of ground in the grave-yard that others do?
The ball does not miss the black man and strike the white, nor the white
and strike the black.... [A]t that time there is no distinction made.” 38

Who had betrayed them? Although the Federal government obviously
reneged on its promises, dissatisfied soldiers tended to place much of the
responsibility on the recruitment agents who had beguiled them with vi¬
sions of patriotic service, handsome bounties, and equal rights. They made
us a great many sweet and charming promises just to get us into the
service,” one soldier charged, "which they were very anxious to do, as it
saved them from going themselves.” The active role played by black leaders
in their recruitment only compounded the bitterness. Before the 14th
Rhode Tglanrl Regiment had even left for the South, Martin R. Delany, the
principal recruitment officer, stood accused of having betrayed young men
"taught to hold his name sacred.” Of those who had participated in organiz¬
ing the regiment, one soldier observed, Delany was "the most heartily
despised.” The complaints of the soldiers were legitimate, but the charges
leveled at the black recruitment agents were, most likely, closer to half-
truths. "Some unprincipled agents” acting "under me” or "even in my
name, ” Delany conceded, may have been guilty of deceiving black recruits,
but he vigorously defended his own record as "the constant and consistent
rj Afoprlpr of colored soldiers’ rights and claims.” Rather than accept a

Black Liberators

reduction in the bounties paid to black enlistees, Delany refused to do any
more recruiting for the Rhode Island regiment. Frederick Douglass, after
protesting the failure of Federal authorities to ensure equal protection and
treatment to black troops, also vowed to discontinue his recruitment activi¬
ties. "I owe it to my long abused people, and especially those of them
already in the army,” he explained, "to expose their wrongs and plead their
cause. I cannot do that in connection with recruiting.... The impression
settles upon me that colored men have much overrated the enlightenment,
justice and generosity of our rulers at Washington. In my humble way I
have contributed somewhat to that false estimate. Hoping to regain his
faith in the government’s assurances, Douglass requested a meeting with
President Lincoln. 39

Readily conceding that inequalities existed between white and black
soldiers, Federal officials argued that expediency justified and perhaps
even demanded the maintenance of racial distinctions, for the self-respect
of the common Yankee soldier was being sorely tested. The fact that he was
now asked to live and fight alongside blacks not only challenged his deeply
held racial prejudices but also raised the humiliating implication that he
had not been able to win the war without black support. To place the two
races on the same level, some argued, was to degrade and demoralize the
white soldier. The inequalities, President Lincoln told Frederick Douglass,
were a regrettable but necessary concession to popular prejudices; never¬
theless, he suggested, blacks had more compelling motives to enlist and
should be w iling to serve under almost any conditions. Ultimately, he
promised Douglass, black soldiers would be accorded equal treatment. That
vague assurance was good enough for Douglass, who resumed his recruit¬
ment activities. 40

But many of the black troops in the field, especially those from the
North, found themselves unable to share Douglass’ renewed confidence. "I
have always been ready for any duty that I have been called upon to
perform,” a soldier wrote from Jacksonville, Florida, "but things work so
different with us from what they do with white soldiers, that I have got
discouraged; and not only myself, but all of our company. Comparing their
condition and treatment with that of whites, black soldiers could not under¬
stand why they should receive less pay ("We do the same work they do, and
do what they cannot”), spend more time in fatigue duty ( I fancy, at times,
that we have exchanged places with the slave”), eat inferior food ("All the
rations that are condemned by the white troops are sent to our regiment ),
and be subjected to inferior officers ("They try to perpetuate our inferiority,
and keep us where we are”). 41

Of the many grievances, the most deeply felt and resented was the
inequality in pay—the fact that white privates were paid $13 a month plus
a $3.50 clothing allowance, while blacks received $10 a month, out of which
$3.00 might be deducted for clothing. This was not only "an unequivocal
breach of contract,” blacks charged, but a hardship on their families at
home. "I could not afford to get a substitute, or I would not be here now,”

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

a draftee wrote from Yorktown, Virginia. Although "it made me feel some¬
what proud to think that I had a right to fight for Uncle Sam,... my wife’s
letters have brought my patriotism down to the freezing point,” anH he
indicated that most of his regiment shared this feeling of despair. If they
were at home, a number of soldiers insisted, they would at least make
enough to provide adequately for their families. "I am not willing to fight
for anything less than the white man fights for,” a Massachusetts soldier
declared. "If the white man cannot support his family on seven dollars per
month, I cannot support mine on the same amount.” 42

The inequality in pay assumed a significance for many soldiers that
went beyond the question of dollars and cents and family support. The
distinction branded them as second-class soldiers and citizens, and this
seemed particularly galling at a time when the nation called upon them
for patriotic service, perhaps even the sacrifice of their lives. "When the
54th left Boston for the South,” a soldier wrote, "they left many white men
at home. Therefore, if we are good enough to fill up white men’s places and
fight, we should be treated then, in all respects, the same as the white
man.” Nor did blacks find altogether persuasive the oft-repeated argument
(which the President himself had made to Douglass) that they had greater
motives for fighting this war and should thus be w illing to serve under any
conditions. Why should they necessarily feel a greater obligation than the
white man to preserve the Union or even to liberate the slaves? "I want
to know if it was not the white man that put them in bondage?” a Massa¬
chusetts soldier asked. "How can they hold us responsible for their evils?
and how can they expect that we should do more to blot it out than they
are willing to do themselves?” Besides, he argued, "if every slave in the
United States were emancipated at once they would not be free yet. If the
white man is not willing to respect my rights, I am not willing to respect
his wrongs.” 43

How to combat the government’s discriminatory policy while fi ghting
an antislavery war posed a real dilemma for the black soldier. Not only
would a refusal to fight subject him to a court-martial and probable execu¬
tion, but any serious interruption of the war effort would delay the libera¬
tion of his enslaved brethren. "Shall it be said that when adversity
overshadowed our land, when four million bondmen prayed for deliver-
ance, that the free colored man looked on calmly and with folded arms on
account of a paltry dollar or two?” This question, raised by a black newspa-
per, could not be easily dismissed. Yet to submit to these racial distinctions
was to confirm their inferiority. The experience of black people in Ameri¬
ca 11 society afforded certain lessons which a Pennsylvania soldier, sta-
tioned in South Carolina, hoped his men would heed: "Our regiment is to
be pitied, for we are always ready to take hold of any thing we are ordered
to do, and never have we refused to obey orders. This is why we are imposed
on; for the horse that draws the most willingly, generally gets the lash the
most freely, and the least recompense for it.” Shortly after their arrival in
the South, this soldier noted, his unit was notified that they would receive

Black Liberators

less pay than the white troops. Immediately, "despair passed over the
whole regiment,” and on payday only a few men signed the payroll, "and
those who did a great many of us tried to influence to the contrary.” 44

Even as the black regiments went into combat, the reaction to unequal
pay assumed the form of organized protest. Until Congress recognized the
legitimacy of their position, several regiments refused to accept any pay at
all. "The enemy is not far off, and we expect an attack every day,” a soldier
with the Rhode Island regiment reported, after which he noted that the
paymaster had offered them their seven dollars a month "and the boys
would not take it.” What was at stake, black troops insisted, was nothing
less than their self-respect. Although the protest was largely confined to
the northern regiments, Colonel Higginson reported that at least one third
of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, "including the best men in the regi¬
ment,” had quietly refused to accept the government’s pay. "We’s gib our
sogerin’ to de Guv’ment, Gunnel,” one of the men told him, "but we won’t
’spise ourselves so much for take de seben dollar.” With such convictions,
many of the regiments held out, some for as long as eighteen months. "Here
we are,” a sergeant with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment reported, "toil¬
ing and sweating beneath the burning rays of the sun, for nothing ... but
our hard tack and salt pork, and a constant attendance of the blues.” 45

While Congress failed to act on their grievances, resentment among
the black troops mounted. "Fifty-two of the non-commissioned officers are
going to hold a meeting upon the subject,” a soldier with the 1st District
of Columbia Regiment reported; "we don’t feel like serving the United
States under such an imposition.” Henry M. Turner, who was serving as
a chaplain to that regiment, confirmed growing apprehension that the
hitherto peaceful protests might assume other forms. Unless the troops
received their full pay soon, Turner wrote, "J tremble with fear for the issue
of things. ” Discontent in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment reached muti¬
nous proportions, with reports that one soldier had been court-martialed
and executed and two had been shot and wounded for refusing to obey
orders. "The fact is,” a corporal reported, "this regiment is bordering on
demoralization.” The commanding officer confessed his sympathy with the
men, "and yet,” he added, "military necessity has compelled me to shoot
two of them.” Conditions in the 55th Massachusetts Regiment were also
close to open rebellion, with more than half the men indicating they were
ready to stack arms and perform no more duties unless fully paid. Sergeant
William Walker of the 3rd South Carolina Volunteers did more than
threaten action; he marched his company to the captain’s tent and ordered
them to stack arms and resign from the Army. Since the government had
broken its contract with his men, he explained, it had no right to demand
their allegiance. Sergeant Walker was court-martialed and shot for
mutiny. 46

Confronted with growing resentment of discrimination and the still
pressing need to attract more recruits to a war of liberation, black spokes¬
men on the home front pressed for equal rights in the Army while at the

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

same time urging more enlistments. After assuring black recruits that the
"magnanimity” of this nation would speedily grant them equal pay, Fred¬
erick Douglass suggested that some blacks might be overreacting to the
issue. "Do you get as good wages now as white men get by staying out of
the service? Don’t you work for less every day than white men get? You
know you do.” Similarly, the influential Christian Recorder, which had
wavered between protest and patriotic accommodation, lamented the in¬
equality in pay but fully supported black enlistments and expressed the
hope "that our men will not stand now on dollars and cents.” What greater
inducement was necessary to fight, John S. Rock asked a black regiment,
than "two centuries of outrage and oppression and the hope of a glorious
future?” What greater inducement was necessary, a black newspaper in
New York asked, than "a chance to drive a bayonet or bullet into the
slaveholders’ hearts?” It was even possible to argue, as did a broadside
calling for black volunteers, that the inequality in pay and bounties should,
"rightly considered,” act as "a fresh incentive” to enlist. Here was the
opportunity to demonstrate "that you are actuated not by love of gain but
by promptings of patriotism.” 47

That the refusal to accept unequal pay was essentially a northern
protest is undeniable. This raised the inevitable charge that, not being
slaves, northern blacks had less of a stake in the war and were more apt
to be moved by such mundane matters as pay, bounties, and benefits.
Disagreement prevailed among the various black regiments as to how they
should respond to unequal treatment, whether this was the proper time or
place for protests, and whether the grievances warranted any kind of
protest. "Those few colored regiments from Massachusetts make more fuss,
and complain more than all the rest of the colored troops in the nation,”
observed Garland H. White, a former Virginia slave who had escaped to
Ohio before the war. He regarded their protests as a disservice to the great
mass ofblack people, whom he urged to rebuke the "spirit of dissatisfaction
and insolence” and compel the "rebellious” troops "to be quiet and behave
themselves like men and soldiers.” 48

With an even greater sense of urgency, the regiments made up largely
of former slaves questioned the protests of their northern brethren. After
noting "some pretty hard grumbling” among the northern regiments in
South Carolina, two soldiers with the 78th United States Colored Troops
(recruited from slaves and free Negroes in Louisiana) conceded "that we
are pretty much in the same boat with them” but thought they had "put
it on a little too thick.” Although their own regiment had enlisted under
the same expectations of full pay, the two soldiers suggested that southern
blacks had entered military service with more compelling motives than
those which moved the northern blacks.

They seem to be fighting for one thing, and we for another. They, for the

money they are to get, and we, to secure our liberation. Tell them to hold

up a little on grumbling. They say a great deal about the distress of their

Black Liberators

families at home. They don't know any thing about distress, till they
come to look at ours. There is not a man of them but knows where his

family is; but hundreds of us don't know where our families are. When
they came away from home, they left their families in the care of their
friends; but we left ours among their enemies, looking only to God to
preserve them . 49

When Congress finally acted in June 1864 to resolve the controversy
over unequal pay, the resulting legislation only partially satisfied black
demands. Although racial distinctions in pay were abolished, the new law
made a curious distinction in retroactive payments between free Negroes
(those free before April 19,1861), who would be paid from the date of their
enlistment, and freedmen, whose retroactive payments would begin on
January 1,1864. This posed a considerable problem in the regiments which
included both free Negroes and ex-slaves. It "divides the colored soldiers
into two grades,” one abolitionist charged, and "does honor to injustice
with a vengeance.” In the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Colonel E. N.
Hallowell worked out a rather ingenious solution. Since the commanders
of black regiments were to determine which of their men were free
Negroes, he simply had them all take an oath that on or before April 19,
1861, they "owed no man unrequited labor.” This was satisfactory for the
54th, which included very few former slaves, but such a solution was
deemed unacceptable in the regiments made up almost exclusively of freed¬
men. "If a year’s discussion ... has at length secured the arrears of pay for
the Northern colored regiment,” an irate Colonel Higginson remarked,
"possibly two years may secure it for the Southern.” Still, the action of
Congress placated the northern regiments, and the first payday (October
1864) under the new law took on a festive air. "Two days have changed the
face of things,” an officer with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment observed.
"The fiddle and other music long neglected enlivens the tents day and
night. Songs burst out everywhere; dancing is incessant; boisterous shouts
are heard, mimicry, burlesque, and carnival; pompous salutations are
heard on all sides.” 50

Perhaps, though, the real struggle had only begun. Despite the equali¬
zation of pay, black soldiers had not yet been accorded the same rights and
recognition as whites. The question of equal protection for black prisoners
of war persisted, as did the absence ofblack representation in court-martial
proceedings, the exclusion of blacks from the military academies, and the
small number of black commissioned officers. Both race pride and the
brutal conduct of some white officers prompted increasing demands for
the appointment of blacks to command black troops. But even some of
the firmest advocates ofblack recruitment found the idea ofblack officers
difficult to accept, violating as it did the white man’s sensibilities and racial
stereotypes in ways that enlisting blacks as common soldiers had not. Since
childhood, blacks had been trained "to obey implicitly the dictates of the
white man” and to believe that they belonged to an inferior race. This

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

might still make them good soldiers but hardly leaders of men. "Now, when
organized into troops/’ a Union officer observed, "they carry this habit of
obedience with them, and their officers being entirely white men, the negro
promptly obeys his orders.” The impression that blacks would naturally
serve white officers more loyally was difficult to dispel, and some observers
seriously questioned if black troops would be willing to serve under black
officers. In the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, "the universal feeling
among the soldiers,” a regimental officer told an antislavery meeting, was
that they did not want "a colored man to play the white man over them.”
But many blacks denied these inferences, charged that the relative absence
of black officers helped to perpetuate the idea of racial inferiority, and
insisted that blacks be judged for promotions and commissions on the same
basis as whites. "We want black commissioned officers,” one soldier argued,
"because we want men we can understand, and who can understand us....
We want to demonstrate our ability to rule, as we have demonstrated our
willingness to obey.” 51

Shortly after the Civil War broke out, Martin R. Delany, still reflecting
the racial pride that had made him an emigrationist and black nationalist
in the 1850s, contemplated "a corps d’Afrique” modeled after the black
Zouaves who had served the French in the Algerine War. Characteristi¬
cally, he stressed that the origin, dress, and tactics of the Zouaves d’Afrique
were uniquely African. Along similar lines, Henry M. Turner, whose racial
pride matched that of Delany but whose advocacy of emigration still lay
in the future, expressed the hope that there would be no racial intermin¬
gling in the newly organized black regiments. "If we do go in the field, let
us have our own soldiers, captains, colonels, and generals, and then an
entire separation from soldiers of every other color, and then bid us strike
for our liberty, and if we deserve any merit it will stand out beyond contra¬
diction.” But Turner’s proposal, like Delamy’s, was premature. Having
made the decision to use blacks as soldiers, the government was not pre¬
pared to flaunt numbers of black officers before an already apprehensive
white public. 52

No sooner had Congress equalized the pay of white and black soldiers
than various schemes for a black army were revived, the most ambitious
plan remaining Martin Delany’s "corps d’Afrique.” This time he took his
idea directly to President Lincoln. What he proposed was a black army
commanded by black officers that would operate essentially as a guerrilla-
type force in the interior, emancipating and arming the slaves wherever
they went. "They would require but little,” Delany assured the President,
"as they could subsist on the country as they went along.” President Lin¬
coln, as Delany described his reaction, could barely contain his enthusiasm.
"This is the very thing I have been looking and hoping for,” he told Delany,
"but nobody offered it.” Having agreed to command and raise such an
army, Delany was co m m is sioned a major and ordered to South Carolina.
The war ended before he could put his plan into operation, but Delany
remained in South Carolina and subsequently embraced and acted upon

Black Liberators

still another vision—political power in a state where blacks comprised a
majority of the population. 53

When 1,100 Union prisoners of war were marched through Petersburg,
Virginia, in August 1864, the spectators who lined the streets viewed with
particular curiosity and mixed emotions the 200 black soldiers. To the
whites in the crowd, few sights could have been more distasteful. At the
very least, a Richmond newspaper observed, the black prisoners should
have been separated from the white Yankees and driven "into a pen” until
their status was determined and their owners located. "Two hundred genu¬
ine Eboshins sprinkled among the crowd of prisoners, and placed on the
same footing, was a sight, the moral effect of which upon the slaves of
Petersburg could not be wholesome.” Equally concerned, Emma Holmes of
South Carolina wondered how Confederate authorities would deal with the
black prisoners recently brought in—"barefoot, hatless and coatless and
tied in a gang like common runaways.” To have them treated like other
prisoners, she confessed, was not only "revolting to our feelings” but "inju¬
rious in its effects upon our negroes.” 54

The Confederacy faced a real dilemma. When the North chose to enlist
blacks as soldiers, the white South immediately conjured up visions of
thousands of armed black men descending upon defenseless families. To
contemplate one rebellious Nat Turner was sufficient cause for alarm, but
to think that the same government which had been empowered by the
Constitution to help suppress insurrections was now arming slaves and
using them to fight white men provoked cries of disbelief. "Great God, what
a state of helpless degradation,” a Virginia slaveholder exclaimed, "our
own negros—bought by our own ancestors from the Yankees, the purchase
money & interest now in their pockets, who first rob us of the negros
themselves, & then arm them to rob us of every thing else—even our lives.”
Although the white South kept insisting that the Negro would fail as a
soldier, fears were expressed that he might succeed. There was an obvious
urgency, then, about the question of how to dispose of captured black
soldiers. What was said to be at stake was not only the security of white
men, women, and children but also the well-being of the slave population.

No matter how the black soldier might perform in combat, the initial
reaction of the Confederacy was to call for "sure and effective” retaliation.
Since the North had determined to arm blacks and wage a war of extermi¬
nation, there was little left for the white South to do but wage "a similar
war in return.” Nor was there any reason to be overly scrupulous about this
probl em , Once the black man became a soldier, he was as much an outlaw
as the men who trained and commanded him. And once black men,
whether northern freedmen or southern slaves, were corrupted by military

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

service, an Atlanta newspaper declared, they could "scarcely become use¬
ful and desirable servants among us.” The message was clear enough. 56

But the Confederacy was never able to resolve this question in any
consistent manner. When the North began to recruit black regiments in
the Mississippi Valley, the Confederate Secretary of War informed the
commanding officer at Vicksburg that captured black soldiers were not to
be regarded as prisoners of war. The official position of the Confederate
government, as stated on numerous occasions, was in no way ambiguous:
captured black soldiers (usually designated as "slaves in arms”) and their
commissioned officers had forfeited the rights and immunities enjoyed by
other prisoners of war. Any officer who helped to drill, organize, or instruct
slaves, with the intention of using them as soldiers, or who commanded
Negro units, was defined as an "outlaw” and deemed guilty of inciting
servile insurrection. Upon capture, he was to be executed "or otherwise
punished at the discretion of the court.” But black captives were to be
turned over to state authorities and treated in accordance with the laws
of the state in which they had been taken prisoner. These laws invariably
demanded their execution as incendiaries or insurrectionists. 57

Although this official position was never repealed, authorities chose to
modify its enforcement. Whatever the guidelines or legislation, most of the
actual decisions were made in the field by unit commanders and lesser
officers. How many blacks were held as captives was never easy to deter¬
mine, largely because Confederate officials refused to report such captives
as prisoners of war. Some black soldiers and military laborers were exe¬
cuted or sold into slavery, but most of them were held in close confinement,
handed over to civilian authorities, or put to work on military fortifica¬
tions. "After arriving at Mobile,” one black captive testified, "we were
placed at work on the fortifications there, and impressed colored men who
were at work when we arrived were released, we taking their places. We
were kept at hard labor and inhumanly treated; if we lagged or faltered,
or misunderstood an order, we were whipped and abused; some of our men
being detailed to whip others.” In the aftermath of the assault on Fort
Wagner, eighteen black soldiers were placed on trial under the insurrec¬
tionary laws of South Carolina but the state failed to win a conviction and
the men were interned as prisoners of war. For many whites, including
some of the highest-ranking Confederate officials, it was preferable to think
that blacks, especially former slaves, who served in the Union Army had
been duped. And since they were little more than "deluded victims of the
hypocrisy and malignity of the enemy,” the Confederate Secretary of War
advised, they should be treated with mercy and returned to their previous
owners, "with whom, after their brief experience of Yankee humanity and
the perils of the military service, they will be more content than ever...”**

The Confederate government refused to agree to any general exchange
of black prisoners of war for prisoners held by the Union Army. This
attitude reflected to some degree a distinction made by Confederate offi¬
cials between free Negroes and slaves. That the North might employ its

Black Liberators

own black residents for military service seems to have been conceded; that
is, the North had as much right to use black men against them as it did
to use elephants, wild cattle, or dogs. But the North had no right to arm
a slave against his master. Nor did the South have any obligation to return
such slaves. In a war, property recaptured from the enemy reverted to its
owner, or could be disposed of in any way the captor deemed proper and
slaves were property. In March 1864, a Confederate lieutenant inquired of
his commanding officer if he could sell the four black soldiers he had
captured and divide the profits among those who had participated in the
mission; the commanding officer advised him "not to report any more such
captures.” What complicated the question of prisoner exchange were cer¬
tain principles said to be immutable that outweighed any legal consider¬
ations. To argue an equality between white and black prisoners, as one
Richmond newspaper observed, was nothing less than an act of northern
insolence. "Confederates have borne and forborne much to mitigate the
atrocities of war; but this is a thing which the temper of the country cannot
endure.” 59

The most efficient way to deal with the vexing issue of black prisoners
was to take no prisoners. This was not even necessarily a racial matter but
a time-honored military principle. Few wars have failed to arouse charges
and countercharges regarding the disposition of soldiers after they have
surrendered. In the Civil War, the presence of armed black men, most of
them former slaves, thereby aggravated an already sensitive issue. For the
common Confederate soldier, the need to confront blacks in armed combat
was still difficult to accept, and the military setbacks he suffered exacer¬
bated his frustrations and hatreds. "I hope I may never see a Negro sol¬
dier,” a Mississippian wrote to his mother, "or I cannot be ... a Christian
Soldier.” After the Battle of Milliken’s Bend, in which black troops distin¬
guished themselves, the Confederate commander reported that substantial
numbers of blacks had been killed and wounded; "unfortunately,” he
added, "some fifty, with two of their white officers were captured.” The
nature of warfare dictated that such matters could not be easily controlled
by official edicts, whether these emanated from Richmond or from the
immediate commanding officer. Every black prisoner "would have been
killed,” a Confederate soldier wrote after the Battle of the Crater, had it
not been for gen Mahone who beg our men to Spare them. Still, as he
noted, one of his fellow soldiers, who had already killed several blacks,
could not restrain himself. Even when General Mahone told him for God s
sake” to stop, the soldier asked to kill one more, as "he deliberately took
out his pocket knife and cut one’s Throat.” Late in the war, as white
southern frustrations mounted, a clash with black troops at Mark s Mill,
Arkansas, resulted in a battlefield "sickening to behold.” "No orders,
threats, or commands,” a Confederate soldier reported, "could restrain the
men from vengeance on the negroes, and they were piled in great heaps
about the wagons, in the tangled brushwood, and upon the muddy and
trampled road.” 60

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Whether or not these were the normal atrocities of warfare, the re¬
ports out of the South aroused blacks already deeply disturbed over other
manifestations of unequal treatment for black soldiers. The failure of the
government to guarantee protection for black troops, in the event of their
capture, had already reportedly caused a slackening in the recruitment
rampaigrng To ensure "full rights and immunities” for all prisoners, re¬
gardless of color, black spokesmen urged the Lincoln administration to
adopt a policy of retaliation: "For every black prisoner slain in cold blood,
Mr Jefferson Davis should be made to understand that one rebel officer
gViall suffer death, and for every colored soldier sold into slavery, a rebel
shall be held as hostage.” When Frederick Douglass resigned his post as a
recruiting agent, he was most emphatic about this particular issue. Even
"the most malignant Copperhead,” Douglass charged, could hardly criti¬
cize President Lincoln for "any undue solicitude” for the rights and lives
of black soldiers. The Confederates murdered blacks in cold blood, shot
down hlaHr military laborers, threatened to sell black prisoners into slav¬
ery, and yet, Douglass noted, "not one word” from the President. "How
many 54ths must be cut to pieces, its mutilated prisoners killed and its
living sold into Slavery, to be tortured to death by inches before Mr. Lincoln
shall say: 'Hold, enough!’ ” Until that time, Douglass declared, "the civi¬
lized world” would hold the President and Jefferson Davis equally responsi¬
ble for these atrocities.® 1

Calling the attempts to enslave prisoners "a relapse into barbarism
and a crime against the civilization of the age,” Lincoln decreed in July
1863 that for every Union soldier killed "in violation of the laws of war,”
a Confederate soldier would be executed; and for every Union soldier en¬
slaved or sold into slavery, a Confederate soldier would be placed at hard
labor on the public works. Although this pronouncement appeared to sat¬
isfy black demands, the President, as well as some black leaders, fully
recognized that the real problem lay with implementation. "The difficulty
is not in stating the principle,” Lincoln remarked, "but in practically ap¬
plying it.” And once applied, he advised Douglass, there was no way to
know where it might end. Among the questions raised by the President’s
order was whether the northern white public was actually prepared to
accept this kind of retaliation. At least one black newspaper remained
skeptical. If any attempts were made to retaliate for the murder of black
soldiers, the editor suggested, Confederate authorities were counting on
the probability "that Northern sentiment, already weak on the subject,
will revolt against taking the life of white men for 'Niggers.’ ” 82

The battle fought on April 12,1864, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where
blacks comprised nearly half the garrison, provoked the most bitter black
protest of the Civil War. "We had hoped,” a black newspaper declared,
"that the first report might have been exaggerated; but, in this, we have
been doomed to disappointment.” Nearly 300 Union soldiers (the precise
number varied with every report) were slain after they had thrown down
their arms and surrendered. The conflicting accounts of what happened

Black Liberators

were never satisfactorily resolved. Subsequent testimony, however, leaves
little doubt as to the indiscriminate slaughter undertaken by Confederate
troops. Only the extent of the annihilation remains uncertain. To black
people, and to much of the white northern public, it became known as the
"Fort Pillow Massacre.” But to General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who
commanded the Confederate forces, it was simply that place on the Missis¬
sippi River, "dyed with the blood of the slaughtered,” where his troops had
conclusively demonstrated "to the Northern people that negro soldiers
cannot cope with Southerners.” The total number of Union dead, Forrest
observed, “will never be known from the fact that large numbers ran into
river and were shot and drowned.” The casua ln ess with which the
general treated the massacre suggested no need to defend his conduct or
the murders committed under his command. 63

Although shocked by the Fort Pillow Massacre, angry blacks expressed
little surprise. Since the United States government refused to recognize
black soldiers as equal to whites, why should the Confederacy? The
tragedy, blacks charged, only underscored the tardiness with which the
Lincoln administration and Congress had acted upon their demands for
equal protection, equal treatment, and equal rights. "I do not wonder at the
conduct and disaster that transpired at Fort Pillow,” a Massachusetts
soldier wrote from South Carolina. "I wonder that we have not had more
New York riots and Fort Pillow massacres.” Perhaps, though, these deaths
had not been in vain, suggested Richard H. Cain, a black clergyman. At the
very least, he hoped, what transpired at Fort Pillow might serve to educate
the northern public. "None but the blacks of this land, have heretofore
realized the hateful nature of the beast: but now, white men are beginning
to feel, and to realize what its beauties are.” From these deaths, the Rever¬
end Cain vowed, a new spirit would pervade black troops, and he offered
them some words of advice. In future clashes with the enemy, give no
quarter; take no prisoners; make it dangerous to take the. life of a black
soldier by these barbarians.” When that happens, he promised, "they will
respect your manhood, and you will be treated as you deserve at the hands
of those who have made you outlaws.” 64

Several months after the Fort Pillow affair, the anger had not yet
subsided. In the wake of new reports of black soldiers "mown down like
grass at Petersburg,” the Reverend H. H. White told a mass meeting called
by Boston Negro leaders that a sense of despair prevailed among the peo¬
ple. But he refused to be discouraged. Whatever the losses sustained by
black people, the thought that should remain uppermost in their minds is
that God had brought about the sacrifice of millions of men in other coun¬
tries "for the cause of liberty and humanity.” The speakers who followed,
however, found it impossible to share the Reverend White’s optimism or
explanation. The most forceful disclaimer came from William Wells
Brown, a veteran black abolitionist and former advocate of emigration who
had recently helped to recruit the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. "Mr.
White’s God is bloodthirsty!” Brown charged. "I worship a different kind

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

of God My God is a God of peace and good will to men.” Although he had
once urged black men to fight, in order to convince "this God-forsaken
nation” that they could be as courageous as other men, he now confessed
his doubts and disillusionment. "Our people have been so cheated, robbed,
deceived, and outraged everywhere, that I cannot urge them to go... . We
have an imbecile administration, and the most imbecile management that
it is possible to conceive of. If Mr. Whites God is managing the affairs of
this nation, he is making a miserable failure.” 85

Since editorial outrage, mass meetings, and executive decrees were
obviously insufficient to deal with the problem, black troops were left to
consider actions that might produce the effect initially intended by the
President’s order. An officer with the 22nd United States Colored Troops
made explicit a growing feeling among many of the black soldiers: Sir, we
can bayonet the enemy to terms on this matter of treating colored soldiers
as prisoners of war far sooner than the authorities at Washington can bring
him to it by negotiation. This I am morally persuaded of ” Six days after
the fall of Fort Pillow, Confederate troops in Arkansas routed Union forces
in the Battle of Poison Spring, including soldiers belonging to the 1st
****** Colored Regiment. Not only were some black prisoners summarily
executed but captured Union wagons were also driven back and forth over
the bodies of wounded blacks. That was more than sufficient inducement
for the men of the 2nd Kansas Colored Regiment to vow to take no more
prisoners, and in a subsequent clash at Jenkins Ferry, Arkansas, the black
regiment charged the Confederate lines, shouting "Remember Poison
Spring,” and inflicted heavy losses on the enemy. But they fell slightly
short of their avowed goal; one Confederate prisoner was taken appar¬
ently by mistake—and he was returned to his regiment to impart the
lessons of this battle. When black troops at Memphis reportedly took an
oath "on their knees” to avenge Fort Pillow and show no mercy to the
enemy, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, of all people, lodged a Confeder¬
ate protest, charging that the oath had been taken in the presence of Union
officers. "From what I can learn,” a Union general replied, "this act of
theirs was not influenced by any white officer, but was the result of their
own sense of what was due to themselves and their fellows who had been
mercilessly slaughtered.” 68

The Fort Pillow Massacre obviously had a different impact than Gen¬
eral Forrest intended. If blacks were not to be treated as prisoners of war,
they would fight that much harder to avoid capture. "As long as we are not
recognized by the Federal Government,” a black corporal wrote, we do not
expect the enemy to treat us as prisoners of war; and, as there is no
alternative left for us, we will kill every rebel we capture.” Writing from
his camp near Petersburg, Virginia, a black sergeant noted that his regi¬
ment had gone into battle shouting "Remember Fort Pillow!” and that
"more rebels gave themselves up that day than were actually taken prison¬
ers.” No matter how inflated may have been some reports of black ven¬
geance, sufficient instances were recorded to suggest that black troops

Black Liberators

fought with even greater ferocity and determination, some oftjfinappar-
ently convinced that to be captured was to be murdered m cold blood. The
fact that Confederate officers tried to disclaim any such intentions partly
reflected a growing concern over the morale of their own *5 00ps ' , ,

Johnnies are not as much afraid of us as they are of the Mokes Jlack
troops],” a white Union soldier wrote from Petersburg. "When they charge
they wfll not take any prisoners, if they can help it. Their cry is, Remember
Fort Pillow!’ Sometimes, in their excitement, they forget what to say, wh
they catch a man they say: 'Remember what you done to us, way back,

down dar!’ ” 67

When union gunboats came up the Combahee River in South Carolina,
the slave laborers on the rice plantations dropped their hoes an ^ r ^ J e ^
of them knew what to expect of the Yankees, and some no doubt believed
the atrocity stories related by their masters and mistresses. Im^ne the
surprise of these slaves when they finally caught their first ghmpse of the
invaders. None of their "white folks” had thought to teU them that the
Yankee devils might also be black men. In this instance the soldiers be-
longed to the newly formed 2nd South Carolina Volunteers which had
been recruited largely from former slaves. Colonel Ja “^ 0 .j t f°“^ sas
white commanding officer, had fought with John

guerrilla wars. And the "scout” who accompanied him on this raid was
none other than Harriet Tubman, known to many of the f aves ^ ^oses
for the forays she had made into the South before the war to escort fugitives
to freedom This time she had the backing of Federal guns as she supervised
the removal of slaves from the Combahee River plantations.

The slaves looked on in amazement as armed black men came ashore
and burned down the homes of white men. "De brack sojer so P* esu ^P
tious,” one slave kept muttering, his head shaking with admirationand
disbelief at what he was witnessing. "Dey come right ^ore, liold a p dere
head. Fus’ ting I know, dere was a barn, then tousand bushel rough rice
all in a blaze, den mas’r’s great house, all cracklin up de roof. It had
be an impressive spectacle, and this slave seemed to relish every minute,
no move to put out the flames. "Didn’t I keer for see em blaze. ^
he exclaimed. "Lor, mas’r, didn’t care notin’ at all. I was gwmeto de boat
For the soldiers, as for the slaves who were now rushing to the gunboats
a holiday atmosphere prevailed. "I nebber see such a sight an exultant
Harriet Tubman declared-"pigs squealin’, chickens

squallin' ” Elderly couples vied with the young to reach the boats, deter¬
mined to leave "de land o’ bondage”; numerous women came aboard one
of them balancing a pail on her head ("rice a smokin m it jus as she d
taken it from de fire”), most of them loaded down with baskets and bags

been in the stoem so long

containing their worldly possessions. "One woman brought two pigs, a
white one an’ a black one,” Harriet Tubman recalled; "we took ’em all on
board; named de white pig Beauregard, and de black pig Jeff Davis.” With
more than 700 slaves aboard, the gunboats finally set out for Beaufort.

Nowhere in the Confederate South was the impact of the Civil War
more graphically demonstrated than in the sight of armed and uniformed
black men, most of them only recently slaves, operating as a liberation and
occupation army. The grievances of the black soldier often took on a dimin¬
ished importance when he contemplated his role in this war. Men and
women, old and young, were running through the streets, shouting and
praising God,” one soldier wrote after his regiment had entered Wilming¬
ton, North Carolina. "We could then truly see what we had been fighting
for ’ and could almost realize the fruits of our labors.” With his regiment
nearing Richmond, another soldier exulted, "We have been instrumental
in liberating some five hundred of our sisters and brethren from the ac¬
cursed yoke of human bondage.” The scenes which greeted black soldiers
in their march through the South-abandoned plantation houses, joyous
celebrations of freedom, reunions of families separated by slavery, the
shocked and angry faces of white men and women—were bound to make
a deep and lasting impression. For many of the northern blacks, this was
their first look at the South and the Southerner. "I have noticed a strange
peculiarity among the people here,” a soldier with the 54th Massachusetts
Regiment noted. "They are all the most outrageous stutterers. If you meet
one and say, 'How are you?’ as you pass, you could walk a whole block
before he could sputter out the Southern, 'Right smart, I thank-ee.’ ” The
soldiers were moved not only by the effusive welcomes they usually re¬
ceived from the slaves but also by observing at first hand the effects of a
lifetime of bondage. "I often sit down and hear the old mothers down here
tell how they have been treated,” a Pennsylvania soldier wrote. "It would
your heart ache.... They have frequently shown me the deep marks
of the cruel whip upon their backs.” Many of the black soldiers located
family members and revived old friendships, while some began courtships
that would result in new relationships. 69

Perhaps most memorable were the occasions on which the soldiers who
had once been slaves were afforded the opportunity to manifest their con¬
tempt for the relics and symbols of their enslavement. "We is a gwine to
pay our respectable compliments to our old masters,” one soldier declared,
summing up the sentiments of his regiment. While marching through a
region, the black troops would sometimes pause at a plantation, ascertain
from the slaves the name of the "meanest” overseer in the neighborhood,
and then, if he had not fled, "tie him backward on a horse and force him
to accompany them.” Although a few masters and overseers were whipped
or strung up by a rope in the presence of their slaves, this appears to have
been a rare occurrence. More commonly, black soldiers preferred to appor¬
tion the contents of the plantation and the Big House among those whose
labor had made them possible, sing l ing out the more "notorious” slavehold-

Black Liberators

ers flnH systematically ransacking and demolishing their dwellings. "They
gutted his mansion of some of the finest furniture in the world,” wrote
Chaplain Henry M. Turner, in describing a regimental action in North
Carolina. Having been informed of the brutal record of this slaveholder, the
soldiers had resolved to pay him a visit. While the owner was forced to look
on, they went to work on his "splendid mansion” and "utterly destroyed
every thing on the place.” Wielding their axes indiscriminately, they shat¬
tered his piano and most of the furniture and ripped his expensive carpets
to pieces. What they did not destroy they distributed among his slaves. And
when the owner addressed one of the soldiers "rather saucily,” he was
struck across the mouth and sent reeling to the floor. Chaplain Turner, who
witnessed the action, obviously thought no explanation was necessary for
the punishment meted out to this planter. "It was on Sabbath,” he noted,
and "as Providence would have it,” the men had halted their march to eat
and rest near the home of this "infamous” slaveholder.

Oh, that I could have been a Hercules, that I might have carried off some
of the fine mansions, with all their gaudy furniture. How rich I would be
now? But I was not. When the rich owners would use insulting language,
we let fire do its work of destruction. A few hours only are necessary to
turn what costs years of toil into smoke and ashes.

Besides, after observing the work of General Sherman’s armies, Chaplain
Turner concluded that "we were all good fellows.” 70

Had such scenes been imagined at the outset of the Civil War, the
sensibilities of white Americans would no doubt have been shocked. Yet,
but two years later, black soldiers of the United States Army, most of them
freed slaves, engaged their former masters in combat, marched through the
southern countryside, paraded and drilled in southern towns and villages,
and brought the news of freedom to tens of thousands of slaves. The
change seems almost miraculous,” a black sergeant conceded. The very
people who, three years ago, crouched at their master’s feet, on the ac¬
cursed soil of Virginia, now march in a victorious column of freedmen, over
the same land.” When violating southern codes and customs, black soldiers
appeared to be fully aware of the significance of their actions. We march
through these fine thoroughfares,” a soldier wrote from Wilmington, North
Carolina, "where once the slave was forbid being out after nine p m., or to
puff a 'regalia,’ or to walk with a cane, or to ride “ a c “ r ™ g ?- Neg !?
soldiers!—with banners floating.” And with unconcealed delight, JamffiF.
Jones wrote from New Orleans how he had "walked fearlessly and bo y
through the streets of a southern city ... without being required to take
off his S cap at every step, or to give all the sidewalks to those lordly princes

of the sunny south, the planters’ sons! ,

Nor would any black soldier soon forget that exhilarating moment
when he and his men marched into a southern city amidst crowds of
cheering slaves who rushed out into the streets to embrace them and to

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

clasp their hands. It seemed to one soldier that the slaves "look for more
certain help, and a more speedy termination of the war, at the hands of the
colored soldiers than from any other source; hence their delight at seeing
us.” Although some slaves greeted them initially with suspicion and disbe¬
lief ("Are you the Yankees?”) or even with hostility ("wild Africans”), the
restraints broke down quickly in most places and what ensued were cele¬
brations that lasted far into the night. "I was indeed speechless,” a black
sergeant wrote from Wilmington after the tumultuous reception given his
regiment. "I could do nothing but cry to look at the poor creatures so
overjoyed.” To the disgust of a white resident of Camden, South Carolina,
the black troops staged a regular camp meeting to which local blacks were
invited—"tremendous excitement prevailed, as they prayed their cause
might prosper and their just freedom be obtained.” 72

When black troops entered Charleston singing the John Brown song,
they found themselves immediately surrounded by the black residents.
Upon seeing the soldiers, one elderiy slave woman threw down her crutch
and shouted that the year of the Jubilee had finally arrived. Some of the
soldiers and their officers, after what they had witnessed, confessed that
"the glory and the triumph of this hour” simply defied description. "It was
one of those occasions which happen but once in a lifetime.” Several weeks
later, newly commissioned Major Martin R. Delany arrived in Charleston,
still hoping to consummate his vision of a "corps d’Afrique.” He could
barely restrain himself at the thought of entering the city "which, from
earliest childhood and through life, I had learned to contemplate wdth
feelings of the utmost abhorrence.” After pausing momentarily to view
"the shattered walls of the once stately but now deserted edifices of the
proud and supercilious occupants,” he found himself "dashing on in un¬
measured strides through the city, as if under a forced march to attack the
already crushed and fallen enemy.” 73

After a Virginia planter heard from his father alarming reports of
black occupation troops, he vowed to keep the letter for his children in
order to aid him "in cultivating in their hearts an eternal hatred to Yan-
keedom.” The expression "What I most fear is not the Yankees, but the
negroes” summed up the apprehensions that gripped southern whites as
Union troops neared their homes. Having expected little else, black sol¬
diers grew accustomed to the cold stares and defiant looks on the faces of
the defeated whites. "You cannot imagine, wdth what surprise the inhabi¬
tants of the South, gaze upon us,” a black sergeant remarked. "They are
afraid to say anything to us; so they take it out in looking.” The sight of
black troops patrolling the city streets and passing through the planta¬
tions, and the fact that many of their owm slaves were among these regi¬
ments, constituted for many whites the ultimate humiliation of the Civil
War. "There’s my Tom,” one planter muttered, his face reddening, as he
viewed some passing soldiers. "How Fd like to cut the throat of the dirty,
impudent good-for-nothing!” Some of the whites he observed, Henry M.
Turner noted, appeared to be uncertain "as to whether they are actually
‘n another world, or whether this one is turned wrong side out.” 74 No

Black Liberators

matter how hard whites tried to keep their thoughts to themselves, the
indignation they felt could not always be contained. They shook their fists
at the passing troops, spit at them from behind the windows where they
were standing, ordered them to stay out of their yards, and expressed rage
and disbelief whenever any black regiment was kept in the town or neigh¬
borhood as an occupation force. "Those dreadful negro wretches, whose
very looks betokened their brutal natures,” one white woman observed,
"caused an indefinable thrill of horror and loathing.” 75

Although the black soldier made few attempts to provoke the whites,
he, too, had difficulty in containing his feelings. The position he now held,
moreover, gave him a novel opportunity to demand obedience from whites
and impress upon them how the old relationships had been rendered obso¬
lete. When several "white ladies and slave oligarchs” came to Henry M.
Turner at regimental headquarters to request government rations, they
entered his office, he said, "in the same humiliating custom which they
formerly would have expected from me.” And it gave him immense satis¬
faction, he confessed afterwards, to see them "crouching before me, and I
a negro.” Several weeks later, Chaplain Turner accompanied his regiment
as they crossed a river near Smithfield, North Carolina. Before wading
through the stream, the men stripped off their clothes. I was much
amused,” Turner wrote, "to see the secesh women watching with the ut¬
most intensity, thousands of our soldiers, in a state of nudity.”

I suppose they desired to see whether these audacious Yankees were
really men , made like other men, or if they were a set of varmints. So they
thronged the windows, porticos and yards, in the finest attire imaginable.

Our brave boys would disrobe themselves, hang their garments upon
their bayonets and through the water they would come, walk up the
street, and seem to say to the feminine gazers, "Yes, though naked, we
are your masters .” 76

With obvious pride and satisfaction, some black soldiers chose to visit
their old masters and mistresses. After the Battle of Nashville, a nineteen-
year-old black youth from Tennessee used his furlough for this purpose. His
former mistress seemed happy to see him. "You remember when you were
sick and I had to bring you to the house and nurse you?” she asked him.
He replied affirmatively. But now, she exclaimed, "you are fighting me!”
"No’m, I ain’t fighting you,” he replied, "I’m fighting to get free.

By the end of the Civil War, more than 186,000 black men, most of them
(134,111) recruited or conscripted in the slave states, had served in the
Union Army, comprising nearly 10 percent of the total enrollment. Almost
as many blacks, men and women, mostly freedmen, were employed as

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

teamsters, carpenters, cooks, nurses, laundresses, stevedores, blacksmiths,
coopers, bridge builders, laborers, servants, spies, scouts, and guides. "This
army would be like a one-handed man, without niggers/ 5 a Union soldier
conceded. "We have two rgts. of fighting nigs, and as many more of dig¬
gers_The nigs, work all night, every night, planting guns and building

breast-works. 55 Seldom paid (if at all), herded together and marched from
their tents to work, sometimes under the watchful eyes of overseers, black
military laborers often perceived little change in their lives, except for the
acknowledgment of their "freedom. 5578

Among both the soldiers and the laborers, the Civil War exacted a
heavy price in human lives. Some one third of the black soldiers—an
estimated 68,178 men—were listed as dead and missing, 2,751 of them
killed in combat. For both white and black soldiers, the overwhelming
majority of deaths resulted from disease rather than military action.
Among the more unglamorous statistics of the Civil War is the fact that
deaths from diarrhea and dysentery alone exceeded those killed in battle.
And most diseases did not discriminate according to race any more than
enemy fire in their devastation of the ranks. Despite the claim that blacks
were less susceptible to diseases which felled whites, the death rate from
disease was nearly three times as great for black soldiers as for whites. 79

When blacks were first recruited, considerable doubt prevailed as to
how they would perform as soldiers, particularly under enemy fire. "Many
hope they will prove cowards and sneaks, 55 a New York newspaper per¬
ceived, while "others greatly fear it. 55 Two years of experience with black
troops made believers of most of the doubters. The evaluations made by
Union officers, while agreeing rather remarkably on the military capabili¬
ties of blacks, also revealed that the very qualities often stressed in racial
stereotypes as marking blacks different from (hence "inferior 55 to) whites
made them commendable soldiers. Since they were "more docile and obedi¬
ent, 55 blacks were thought to be easier to control and command. "Their
docility, their habits of unquestioning obedience, 55 one soldier observed,
"pre-eminently fit them for soldiers. To a negro an order means obedience
in spirit as well as letter.” Accustomed as they were to heavy menial labor,
black soldiers were found to work "more constantly 55 and "obediently 55 than
whites and to offer fewer "complaints and excuses. 55 Although blacks were
considered to be excessive in their religious worship ("Their singing, pray¬
ing, and shouting in camp had to be arrested, sometimes, at the point of
the bayonet 55 ), this characteristic, too, could be viewed as a military virtue.
The fact that blacks were "a religious people 55 suggested to one Union
officer "another high quality for making good soldiers, 55 while it prompted
Major General David Hunter, who had organized the first slave regiment
in South Carolina, to observe that "religious sentiment—call it fanaticism,
such as you like ... made the soldiers of Cromwell invincible. 55 The white
man had also conceded to blacks a natural gift for music and rhythm, and
this helped to explain their aptness for military drill and marching. "In
mere drill they must beat the whites, 55 one soldier conceded; "for 'time, 5

Black Liberators

which is so important an item in drilling, is a universal gift to them.” But
even if blacks clearly had the potential for becoming good soldiers, the
assumption prevailed that only white men could properly lead them,
largely because blacks were accustomed to obeying whites and had too
little regard for their own race. "They certainly need white officers for a
while, and the best of officers, too,” a sympathetic white soldier argued,
"for they will, like children, lean much on their superiors.” 80

Although former slaves made up the largest portion of black troops,
disagreement prevailed over whether they were better soldiers than the
northern blacks who had never experienced bondage. Ignoring the question
of motivation (which black commentators usually cited), a Union officer
from New York thought the northern blacks had more self-reliance and
came closer "to the qualities of the white man in respect to dash and
energy”; several other officers in his unit concurred with this judgment
and they unanimously agreed that slaves were less desirable as soldiers.
The most vigorous defense of the slave as soldier was made by Colonel
Higginson, whose South Carolina regiment consisted almost exclusively of
recently held bondsmen. He preferred them as soldiers, he explained, be¬
cause of "their greater docility and affectionateness” and "the powerful
stimulus” which prompted men to fight for their own homes and families.
The demeanor of his men, moreover, he considered superior to "that sort
of upstart conceit which is sometimes offensive among free negroes at the
North, the dandy-barber strut.” But Higginson refused to argue, as did
some Union officers, that slavery with its emphasis on submission and
obedience had prepared slaves for military service. "Experience proved the
contrary,” he insisted. "The more strongly we marked the difference be¬
tween the slave and the soldier, the better for the regiment. One half of
military duty lies in obedience, the other half in self-respect. A soldier
without self-respect is worthless.” 81

The prevailing assessment of the black soldier in combat was that he
conducted himself as well as the white man. That in itself was a substantial
concession. "They seem to have behaved just as well and as badly as the
rest and to have suffered more severely,” concluded a white officer who but
two years earlier had warned that the use of blacks as soldiers would be
a serious blunder (like "Hamlet's ape, who broke his neck to try conclu¬
sions”). Some black soldiers deserted under fire, though proportionately
fewer than in the white regiments. Much like the white soldiers, blacks
complained of camp conditions, oppressive officers, and punishments out of
proportion to the offenses committed—and some blacks argued that racial
discrimination aggravated each of these grievances. Like the white sol¬
diers, blacks suffered the moments of disillusionment, frustration, and
weariness that are characteristic of any war, particularly a struggle as
agonizing and brutal as the Civil War. "More than one half of our whole
command was... sacrificed without gaining any particular object,” a black
soldier remarked after a battle in which 231 of the 420 men in his outfit

100

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

had been killed or wounded. The same observation might have been made
by the common soldier of any war in history. 82

Both white and black soldiers shared a capacity for incredible valor
(seventeen black soldiers and four black sailors were awarded Congres¬
sional Medals of Honor), battle fatigue, and outright fear. "I prayed on the
battle field some of the best prayers I ever prayed in my life,” one black
soldier readily confessed, and "'made God some of the finest promises that
ever were made.” And for some blacks, as for some whites, the level of
violence and inhumanity reached in this war was too much to bear. "I sho’
wishes lots of times I never run off from de plantation. I begs de General
not to send me on any more battles, and he says Fs de coward and sympa¬
thizes with de South. But I tells him Ijes’ couldn’t stand to see all dem men
layin’ dere dyin’ and hollerin’ and beggin’ for help and a drink of water,
and blood everywhere you looks.” But when it came down to the real test,
most of the black soldiers fought, and many of them died, and that was all
the evidence most observers required. Nor did the black soldier who had
been a slave evince any hesitation about facing his former master in the
field of combat. "Our masters may talk now all dey choose,” a black soldier
replied when told that slaves loved their old masters too much to fight
them; "but one ting’s sartin ,—dey don't dare to try us. Jess put de guns into
our hans, and you’ll soon see dat we not only knows how to shoot, but who
to shoot. My master wouldn’t be wuff much ef I was a soldier.” 83

The white Yankee soldier gradually grew accustomed to the sight of
uniformed blacks. In some regions, the initial hostility subsided when black
regiments relieved the whites of fatigue and garrison duties and did a
disproportionate share of the heavy labor. "Never fear that soldiers will be
found objecting to negro enlistments,” a Massachusetts private noted.
"One hour’s digging in Louisiana clay under a Louisiana sun, and we are
forever pledged to do all we can to fill up our ranks with the despised and
long-neglected race.” With additional experience, moreover, impressions of
the military capabilities of blacks also became more favorable. When he
first undertook to train black troops in South Carolina, Lieutenant Colonel
John S. Bogert thought it would take some time "to make soldiers of my
darkies” but he was determined to succeed. "I will either make soldiers of
them or make them wish they were slaves again.” Two weeks later, he was
confident of making a disciplined regiment out of them. "You would be
surprised to see how they improve by being kindly treated, they begin to
act like men & they soon feel that they are of some account & have very
curious ways of showing their dignity.” 84

But even as black soldiers were said to be creating "a revolution in
thinking’ in the Union Army, the initial sources of hostility were not so
easily displaced, and deeply entrenched racial antipathies still had a way
of surfacing. For some whites, the black soldiers were never more than
comic relief. "There are about three regiments of darkies raised here for
Wildes brigade,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote home, "regular Congoes
with noses as broad as a plantation and lips like raw beefsteaks, Yah!”

Black Liberators

101

Although some white officer's warned that they would withhold their troops
from any engagement in which blacks were placed in command as commis¬
sioned officers, this never became a problem. Far more serious were the
racial antagonisms that erupted into bloody encounters between white and
black soldiers. After one such clash at Ship Island, Mississippi, white gun¬
ners disregarded orders to cover the advance of three black companies;
instead, they turned the field pieces on their black comrades. 85 But such
occurrences proved to be rare. The conduct of the black soldier was such
as to convince even white Yankees who refused to give up their racial
hatreds that military necessity dictated a policy of recognition and cooper¬
ation. "I never believed in niggers before,” a Wisconsin cavalry officer
confessed, "but by Jasus, they are hell in fighting.” 86

Not only did the black soldier impress many of his white comrades but
he proved himself to his own people, did wonders for their racial pride, and
gave them some genuine heroes and prospective leaders. "Dey fought and
fought and shot down de 'Secesh,’ and n’er a white man among ’em but two
captains,” a newly freed slave boasted to one of the white missionary
teachers. When Robert Smalls, hero of the Planter affair, visited New York
City in 1862, he was acclaimed and feted by the black populace for having
performed a military feat "equaled by only a few events in any other war.”
The black people of his native South Carolina would honor him in the next
several decades by electing him to the state legislature and to the United
States Congress. But even if few blacks reached such heights, the uniform
and the rifle, as Douglass had predicted, were capable of effecting signifi¬
cant changes in the demeanor of many black men. "Put a United States
uniform on his back and the chattel is a man” one white soldier observed.
"You can see it in his look. Between the toiling slave and the soldier is a
gulf that nothing but a god could lift him over. He feels it, his looks show
it.” 87

The fact that black men had played a significant role in liberating their
enslaved brethren and preserving the Union would remain a source of
considerable pride, even as it led them to expect much of the future. Once
the war ended, the black soldier expected that a grateful nation would
accord him and his people the rights of American citizens. He had demon¬
strated his loyalty. He had fought for his country’s survival. On the bat¬
tlefields of the South—at Port Hudson, Battery Wagner, Milliken’s Bend,
Olustee, and Petersburg—he had disproved those widely held notions
about his inability to handle firearms or meet the test of fire. What more
could white Americans expect of him? Like any victor, was he not entitled
to share in the triumph? If he expected much of the United States, it was
because he had served its citizens well. Reflecting upon the role of blacks
in the war, Thomas Long, a former slave and a private in the 1st South
Carolina Volunteers, suggested to the men of his regiment that they had
faced and surmounted obstacles almost unprecedented in the history of
warfare—the test of enemy fire and the suspicions and hostility of their
own comrades.

102

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

We can remember, when we fust enlisted, it was hardly safe for we to pass
by de camps to Beaufort and back, lest we went in a mob and carried side
arms. But we whipped down all dat—not by going into de white camps
for whip um; we didn’t tote our bayonets for whip um; but we lived it
down by our naturally manhood; and now de white sojers take us by de
hand and say Broder Sojer. Dats what dis regiment did for de Epiopian
race.

If we hadn’t become sojers, all might have gone back as it was before;
our freedom might have slipped through de two houses of Congress and
President Linkum’s four years might have passed by and notin’ been
done for us. But now tings can neber go back, because we have showed
our energy and our courage and our naturally manhood.

Whatever happened to them after the war, Private Long declared, the
memory of their participation in that conflict would be handed down to
future generations of black people. "Suppose,” he speculated, "you had
kept your freedom witout enlisting in dis army; your chilen might have
grown up free and been well cultivated so as to be equal to any business,
but it would have been always flung in dere faces—Tour fader never
fought for he own freedom’—and what could dey answer? Neber can say
that to dis African Race any more.” 88

That black men managed to win the respect of white America only by
fighting and killing white men was an ironic commentary on the ways in
which American culture (like many others) measured success, manliness,
and fitness for citizenship. "Nobly done, First Regiment of Louisiana Na¬
tive Guard!” a New York newspaper proclaimed after the assault on Port
Hudson. "That heap of six hundred corpses, lying there dark and grim and
silent before and within the works, is a better proclamation of free¬
dom than President Lincoln’s.” Some seventy years after the Civil War,
W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that it may have required "a finer type of
courage” for the slave to have worked faithfully while the nation battled
over his destiny than for him to have plunged a bayonet into the bowels
of a complete stranger. But the black man, Du Bois noted, could prove his
manhood only as a soldier. When he had argued his case with petitions,
speeches, and conventions, scarcely a white man had listened to him. When
he had toiled to increase the nation’s wealth, the white man had compen¬
sated him with barely enough for his subsistence. When he had offered to
protect the women and children of his master, many white men had consid-
ered him a fool. But when the black man "rose and fought and killed,” Du
Bois observed, "the whole nation with one voice proclaimed him a man and
brother.” Nothing else, Du Bois was convinced, had made emancipation or
black citizenship conceivable but the record of the black soldier. 89

Recognizing his former master among the prisoners he was guarding,
a black soldier greeted him effusively, "Hello, massa; bottom rail top dis
time!” Observing black soldiers with rifles and bayonets demanding to
verify the passes of white men and women, a Confederate soldier returning

Black Liberators

103

home after a prisoner exchange could hardly believe his eyes. "And our
own niggers, too,” he exclaimed. "If I could have my way, I’d have a rope
around every nigger’s neck, and hang ’em, or dam up this Mississippi River
with them. Only eight or ten miles from this river slaves are working for
their masters as happily as ever.” Both scenes, each of them incredible in
its own way, pointed up much of the confusion into which a rigidly hierar¬
chical society had been thrown. Nor would that confusion of roles end with
the war itself. "I goes back to my mastah and he treated me like his
brother,” recalled Albert Jones, who had spent more than three years in
the Union Army. "Guess he wuz scared of me ’cause I had so much ammu¬
nition on me.” 90

Whether by guarding prisoners, marching through the South as an
army of occupation, or engaging Confederate troops in combat, the black
soldier represented a sudden, dramatic, and far-reaching reversal of tradi¬
tional roles—as spectacular as any in the history of the country. What
made this reversal even more manifest, however, was the conduct of the
slaves on the plantations and farms that lay in the path of the advancing
Union Army. Once the Yankees made their presence felt, or earlier, at the
first sound of distant guns, the ties that bound a slave to his master and
mistress, including loyalties and mutual affections that had endured for
decades, would face their most critical test.

Chapter Three

KINGDOM COMIN’

Well soon be free,

Well soon be free.

When de Lord will call us home.

My brudder, how long.

My brudder, how long,

Tore we done sufferin’ here?

It won’t be long,

’Fore de Lord will call us home . 1

A fter searching the slave quarters, the overseer solved the mystery
Lof the missing ammunition. Ishmael had been accumulating shot and
powder with the intention, as he confessed, to desert to the enemy. That
had been the first indication of trouble on the Manigault rice plantations,
located in coastal Georgia along the Savannah River. The war was in its
seventh month, the slaves had been "working well and cheerfully/ 5 and no
desertions had been reported. But the Yankees were moving into the Sea
Islands, black field hands had reportedly sacked the town of Beaufort, and
a panicky Savannah feared imminent attack. Equally ominous were the
reports of "murmuring 55 and disaffection among the slaves working the
Savannah River plantations. "We had no trouble with our own Negroes, 55
Louis Manigault noted, "but from clear indications it was manifest that
some of them were preparing to run away, using as a pretext their fear of
the Yankees. 55 In the months that followed, Manigault, like so many plan¬
tation managers, came to discover that the always arduous task of control¬
ling enslaved workers took on new dimensions under wartime conditions.
His own slaves would teach him that much and more.

Seeking to minimize potential slave defections, Manigault conferred
with his overseer, William Capers, a "remarkable 55 man and "perfect Gen¬
tleman 55 in whom he had complete confidence. The previous overseer had
foolishly placed himself "on a par with the Negroes/ 5 participating in their

Kingdom Cornin'

105

prayer meetings and "breaking down long established discipline.” Capers
was not so easily misled. He claimed to know the Negro character, arguing
that "if a Man put his confidence in a Negro He was simply a Damned
Fool.” Only by understanding and acting upon that proven proposition, he
believed, had he achieved success in managing slaves. In late 1861, con¬
vinced that "all was not quite correct” among the Manigault slaves, he
advised that those most likely to cause trouble be removed to a safer area.
Manigault agreed, and the two men soon learned how accurately they had
appraised the character of some of those selected. That night, three of them
attempted to escape; they were quickly apprehended and forcibly removed
in handcuffs. The remaining seven "came very willingly.”

Despite these precautions, trouble persisted on the Manigault planta¬
tions. On February 21, 1862, Jack Savage, the head carpenter, ran away.
That came as no surprise to Manigault, who said he epitomized the "bad
Negro.” "We always considered him a most dangerous character & bad
example to the others.... I think Jack Savage was the worst Negro I have
ever known. I have for two years past looked upon him as one capable of
committing murder or burning down this dwelling, or doing any act.” At
the same time, he was "quite smart” and "our best plantation Carpenter,
and that presumably was why he had been retained. Savage did not flee to
the Yankees; instead, he secluded himself in the nearby swamplands,
where other neighborhood runaways soon joined him, including Charles
Lucas, a Manigault slave ("one of our Prime Hands”) who had been en¬
trusted with the plantation stock and who had recently been punished
after the mysterious disappearance of some choice hogs. "His next step,”
Manigault guessed, "was to follow the animals which he had most probably
killed himself, and sent to the retreat where he expected soon to follow.”
Shortly after this incident, Manigault sold a large portion of the livestock.
"This was,” he explained, "through fear of their being all stolen some night
by our Negroes.” On August 16, 1863, nearly eighteen months after his
escape, Jack Savage returned to the plantation, "looking half starved
and wretched in the extreme,” but acting with such impertinence that
Capers suspected he would soon flee again. With Manigault’s approval,
Capers quickly sold him in Savannah for $1,800, despite Savage’s attempt
to depress that price: "It would have provoked you,” the overseer wrote, "to
have heard Jack’s lies of his inability &c.” That same month, Charlie Lucas
was apprehended.

While trying to anticipate runaways among the field hands, Manigault
also had to deal with defections among his household servants. The disap¬
pearance of "his Woman 'Dolly’ ” must have particularly perplexed him,
as the description which he posted in the Augusta and Charleston police
stations indicates:

She is thirty years of age, of small size, light complexion, hesitates some¬
what when spoken to, and is not a very healthy woman, but rather good
looking, with a fine set of teeth. Never changed her Owner, has been
always a house Servant, and no fault ever having been found with her.

106

been in the storm so long

At a loss for a plausible explanation, Manigault finally concluded that she
had been "enticed off by some White Man.” Although such defections
annoyed Manigault, he found even more incredible the strange behavior
of Hector, who for nearly thirty years had been his "favorite Boat Hand”
and "a Negro We all of us esteemed highly.” He had been a good worker,
a trusted slave, "always spoiled both by my Father and Myself, greatly
indulged,” and "my constant companion when previous to my marriage I
would be quite alone upon the plantation.” And yet, he was "the very first
to murmur” and "give trouble” after the outbreak of the war. Only after
considerable personal anguish did Manigault agree to remove him to
Charleston; there was no question in his mind but that Hector would have
hastened to the embrace of his Northern Brethren, could he have foreseen

the least prospect of a successful escape.” . _

The wartime experience with his slaves unsettled Manigault. ine
unexpected behavior of Hector proved to be "only One of the numerous
instances of ingratitude evinced in the African character. In the end, he
would no longer harbor any illusions about the depth of slave fidelity. This
war has taught us the perfect impossibility of placing the least confidence
in any Negro. In too numerous instances those we esteemed the most have

been the first to desert us.” ^ . ..

When Manigault paid his last wartime visit to his Georgia properties,

the sound of cannon fire could be heard in the distance. He thought the
slaves still seemed pleased to see him. More than two years would elapse
before he would see any of them again; meanwhile, on Christmas Eve 1864,
Yankee troops left a trail of destruction as they moved through the largely
abandoned Savannah River plantations. 2

"De war comes ter de great house an* ter de slave cabins jist alike, re¬
called Lucy Ann Dunn, a former slave on a North Carolina plantation.
When the Yankees were reported to be approaching, even the less percep¬
tive whites might have sensed the anxiousness, the apprehension, the ex¬
citement that gripped the slave quarters. "Negroes doing no good,” a
Tennessee planter reported. "They seem to be restless not knowing what
to do. At times I pity them at others I blame them much.” The tension was
by no means confined to the fields but entered the Big House and affected
the demeanor of the servants, including some who had hitherto betrayed
few if any emotions about the war. "I tole you de Nordern soldiers would
come back; I tole you dose forts was no ’count,” Aunt Polly, a Virginia
house slave, exclaimed to the master’s son. "Yes,” he replied, obviously
taken aback by her bluntness, "but you told me the Southern soldiers
would come back, too, when father went away with them.” "Dat because
you cried,” she explained, "and I wanted to keep up your spirits.” With

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107

those words, Aunt Polly, a long-time family favorite for whose services her
master said he could set no price, prepared to leave her "accustomed post
in the kitchen. 3

Although few slaves demonstrated such "impertinence” in the pres¬
ence of the master’s family, they did appear to be less circumspect in
expressing their emotions. The pretenses were now lowered, if not dropped
altogether. "The negroes seem very unwilling for the work,” a young white
woman confided to her journal; "some of their aside speeches very incendi¬
ary. Edward, the old coachman, is particularly sullen.” On some planta¬
tions, the once clandestine prayer meetings were noticeably louder and
more effusive, and there appeared to be fewer reasons to muffle the sounds
before they reached the Big House. The singing in the slave quarters,
Booker T. Washington remembered, "was bolder, had more ring, and lasted
later into the night.” They had sung these verses before but there was no
longer any need to conceal what they meant by them; the words had not
changed, only their immediacy, only the emphasis with which certain
phrases were intoned. "Now they gradually threw off the mask,” Washing¬
ton recalled, "and were not afraid to let it be known that the freedom in
their songs meant freedom of the body in this world.’ 4

The mood of the slaves often defied the analysis of the master. On
certain plantations, the slaves continued to act with an apparent indiffer¬
ence toward the war and the approaching Union troops, leaving their
owners to speculate about what lay behind those bland countenances. In
early 1865, as General Sherman’s troops moved into South Carolina, a
prominent rice planter observed little excitement among his slaves, in fact,
they seemed "as silent as they had been in April, 1861, when they heard
from a distance the opening guns of the war.” Each evening the slave
foreman dutifully obtained his instructions for the next day, and the work
proceeded smoothly and silently. "Did those Negroes know that their free¬
dom was so near? I cannot say, but, if they did, they said nothing, only
patiently waited to see what would come.” A neighboring planter found his
slaves performing little work but they "appear to be calm and are quite
lively. They are orderly and respectful more so than one could expect under
the circumstances.” With Yankee raiding parties reported a few miles
away, the daughter of a Louisiana planter observed the slaves busily en¬
gaged in preparations for a Christmas party. That night, after hearing that
a nearby town had been virtually destroyed, the white family witnessed the
slave festivities with mixed feelings.

We have been watching the negroes dancing for the last two hours.
Mother had the partition taken down in our old house so that they have
quite a long ball room. We can sit on the piazza and look into it. I hear
now the sounds of fiddle, tambourine and "bones” mingled with the
shuffling and pounding of feet. Mr. Axley is fiddling for them. They are
having a merry time, thoughtless creatures, they think not of the mor¬
row.

108

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

On New Year’s Day 1864, Catherine Broun gave her servants their custom¬
ary party—"everything I would prepare for a supper for my own company”
—even as she wondered how many of them would be with her by the end
of the year; the "general opinion” in her neighborhood was that few of the
slaves would remain. "I sometimes think I would not care if they all did
go, they are so much trouble to me we have such a host of them.” 5

Before the arrival of the Union Army, the roadsides were apt to be
filled with the retreating columns of Confederate troops, their condition
imparting most vividly and convincingly the visage of defeat. For many
slaves, that sight alone confirmed what the "grapevine” and the demeanor
of their "white folks” had earlier suggested, and the contrast with the
initial predictions of ultimate victory could hardly have been more strik¬
ing.

I seen our ’Federates go off laughin’ an’ gay; full of life an’ health. Dey
was big an’ strong, asingin’ Dixie an’ dey jus knowed dey was again’ to
win. I seen ’em come back skin an’ bone, dere eyes all sad an’ hollow, an’
dere clothes all ragged. Dey was all lookin’ sick. De sperrit dey lef ’ wid
jus’ been done whupped outten dem. 6

But even the anticipation of freedom did not necessarily prompt slaves to
revel in the apparent military collapse of the Confederacy. Whether from
loyalty to their "white folks,” the need to act circumspectly, or fear of the
Yankees, many slaves looked with dismay at the ragged columns of Confed¬
erate soldiers passing through the towns and plantations. For some, faith¬
fulness may have been less important than simply pride in their homeland,
now being ravaged by strangers who evinced little regard for the property
and lives of Southerners, black or white. 7

The ambivalence that characterized the reaction of some slaves to the
demise of the Confederacy reflected an understandable tension between
attachment to their localities and the prospect of freedom. Three years
after the war, an English visitor asked a Virginia freedman his opinion of
Robert E. Lee. "He was a grand man, General Lee, sah,” the ex-slave
replied without hesitation. "You were sorry when he was defeated, I sup¬
pose?” the visitor then asked. "0 no, sah,” the freedman quickly retorted;
"we were glad; we clapped our hands that day.” If few slaves yearned for
a Confederate victory, they did nevertheless view themselves as Southern¬
ers, they did sense that their lives and destinies were intricately bound
with the white people of the South, and some even shared with whites the
humiliation of defeat. "Dere was jes’ too many of dem blue coats for us to
lick,” a former Alabama slave tried to explain. "Our ’Federates was de bes’
fightin’ men dat ever were. Dere wam’t nobody lak our ’Federates.” 8

When the unfamiliar roar of gunfire echoed in the distance, the emo¬
tions of individual slaves ranged from bewilderment and fear to uncon¬
cealed elation. In eastern Virginia, within earshot of the battle raging at
Manassas, an elderly slave "mammy” preparing the Sunday dinner

Kingdom Cornin'

109

greeted each blast of the cannon with a subdued "Ride on, Massa Jesus/’
When the guns were heard near Charleston, a sixty-nine-year-old woman
exclaimed, "Come, dear Jesus,” and she later recalled having felt "nearer
to Heaben den I eber feel before.” The younger slaves were apt to be less
certain about what was happening around them. The strange noise, the
hasty preparations, the talk in the slave quarters were at the same time
exciting and terrifying. Two young slaves who lived in different sections,
Sam Mitchell of South Carolina and Annie Osborne of Louisiana, each
heard what sounded like thunder when the Yankees approached, and both
of them sought an explanation. "Son,” Sam’s mother assured him, "dat
ain’t no t’under, dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.” When the cannons
ceased booming, Annie’s brother told her, "We’s gwine be all freed from old
Massa Tom’s beatin’s.” No amount of time could dim those recollections,
any more than Sarah Debro, who had been a slave in North Carolina, could
forget the moment she asked her mistress to explain the thunder that had
frightened her "near ’bout to death.” Those were Yankee cannons k il l ing
"our men,” the woman replied, before breaking down in tears. Alarmed by
this unusual sight, Sarah ran to the kitchen, where Aunt Charity was
cooking, and told her what had just happened. "She ain’t cryin’ kaze de
Yankees killin’ de mens,” the black woman declared, "she’s doin’ all dat
cryin’ kaze she skeered we’s goin’ to be sot free.” 9

To perform the usual plantation routines under these conditions
proved to be increasingly difficult. Although planters and overseers tried
to maintain business as usual, and some succeeded, the reported approach
of the Union Army tended to undermine slave discipline and in some places
it brought work to a complete standstill. From the moment Yankee soldiers
were sighted in the vicinity, John H. Bills, a Tennessee planter, found he
could exert little authority over his slaves. "My people seem Contented &
happy, but not inclined to work. They say 'it is no use’ the Yankeys will
take it all ” Moble Hopson, who had been a slave in Virginia, recalled how
they had paid little attention to the war until the day they reported to the
field and found no one there to supervise them. "An’ dey stand ’round an’
laugh an’ dey get down an’ wait, but dey don’ leave dat field all de mawning.
An’ den de word cum dat de Yankees was a cornin’, an’ all dem blacks start
tuh hoopin’ an’ holl’rin’, an’ den dey go on down to deer shacks an’ dey doff
do no work at all dat day.” 10

The approach of the Union Army forced planters and slaves alike into
a flurry of last-minute activity. " ’Fore they come,” a former Georgia slave
recalled, "the white folks had all the niggers busy hidin’ everything they
could.” On the assumption, which proved to be incorrect, that the Yankees
would not disturb the slaves’ possessions, many white families secreted
their valuables in or under the slave cabins or on the very persons of the
slaves. "Miss Gusta calls me and wrops my hair in front and puts her
jewelry in under the plaits and pulls them back and pins them down so you
couldn’t see nothin’.” With Union troops sighted nearby, a South Carolina
planter moved some of his house furniture into the cabin belonging to

110

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Abram Brown, the driver and headman on the plantation, and told him to
claim ownership if the Yankees asked any questions. To the Union soldiers,
it must have looked like the best-furnished slave cabin in the South, and
they refused to believe Brown's story. Knowing the risks, some slaves
simply refused to accept such responsibilities, using time-honored devices.
"Mamma Maria was too nervous,” her mistress wrote, "and cried too much
to have any responsibility put on her.” 11

During those tense, anxious days of waiting, there were slaves who
provided whatever encouragement and support they could muster for their
masters and mistresses. With the Yankees expected any moment, E mm a
LeConte, the daughter of a prominent South Carolinian, found great com¬
fort in the declaration of her servant, Henry, that he would stand by the
family, whatever the consequences. "I believe he means it, but do not know
how he will hold on.” On the day the Union Army entered Columbia, the
LeConte servants (including Henry) returned from the center of town laden
with looted provisions which they then shared with the white family. "How
times change!” a grateful Emma LeConte wrote in her diary that night.
"Those whom we have so long fed and cared for now help us.” Where the
mistress and her daughters were the only remaining whites on the planta¬
tion, the slave women sometimes reversed paternalistic roles and insisted
upon moving into the Big House, even into the same room, to afford them
a greater degree of security. And with so many strangers prowling through
the neighborhood, including Confederate Army stragglers and deserters,
the slaves often treated with apprehension anyone who approached the
plantation. On one Georgia plantation, a "suspicious-looking character”
asked for food, only to be told by the servants that the master was not at
home. But the mistress, who remained upstairs at the insistence of the
servants, sent word to them to feed the stranger. "They made him sit in
the piazza,” she wrote her son afterwards, "and when he attempted to come
into the house (as he said, 'to see how it looked') Flora and Tom barred the
front door. I could see him from the balcony, and when his dinner was ready
they... would not even trust him with a knife or fork, but gave him only
an iron spoon.” 12

Not only did some slaves vow to protect their "white folks,” as though
the imminent arrival of the Yankees required a reaffirmation of loyalty,
but they did what they could to ensure their safety. Preparing for the
Union soldiers, a maid in Mary Chesnut’s household urged her mistress to
bum the diary she had been keeping lest it fall into the hands of the enemy.
During the siege of Vicksburg, Mary Ann Loughborough, along with her
daughter and servants, took refuge in a cave and remained there during
the Yankee bombardment; one of the servants stood guard, gun in hand,
assuring his mistress that anyone who entered "would have to go over his
body first.” No one had more experience in anticipating the changing
moods of a master than did his slaves, and this valuable asset enabled some
of them to save the lives of their masters. When the Yankees were sighted,
Charley Bryant, a Texas slaveholder, ran into the house and grabbed his

Kingdom Cornin’

111

gun. But George Price, the head slave on the plantation, fearing for the
safety of his volatile master, disarmed him and locked him in the smoke¬
house. "He ain’t do dat to be mean,” a former slave recalled, "but he want
to keep old massa outten trouble. Old massa know dat, but he beat on de
door and yell, but it ain’t git open till dem Yankees done gone.” 13

Anticipating the path of the Union Army, many planters had already
removed the bulk of their slaves to safer areas. If that proved impractical,
some attempted to hide them, along with the family jewels, money, and
livestock, until the Yankees had passed through the neighborhood. Revers¬
ing traditional roles, the planter himself might seek refuge in the nearby
woods or swamp, depending upon the slaves to supply him with food and
not to betray his hiding place. Rather than take such chances, Amanda
Stone and her family, like so many others, chose to abandon their planta¬
tion in Louisiana. In helping them to prepare for the hasty evacuation, the
slaves proved helpful—almost too helpful. The family claimed not to be
deceived. "You could see it was only because they knew we would soon be
gone. We were only on sufferance. Two days longer and we think they
would all have gone to the Yankees, most probably robbing and insulting
us before they left.” Only two of the remaining slaves agreed to accompany
them. "So passes the glory of the family,” Kate Stone sighed. Appearances
could, indeed, be deceptive. John S. Wise, the son of a prominent Virginian,
recalled the abandonment of the family plantation near Norfolk and how
Jim, the butler, had diligently assisted them. "Jim my father regarded as
his man Friday. Nobody doubted that one so faithful and so long trusted
would prove true in this emergency.” But after helping to load the carriage
with silverware and valuables, and just before they were to depart, Jim
disappeared. "In vain we called and searched for him. We never saw him
again. The prospect of freedom overcame a lifetime of love and loyalty.” 14

The flight of the white families evoked a variety of responses in their
slaves. Some claimed to understand the decision, though it seemed like a
strange turnabout to remain on the plantation while the white folks ran.
"Funny how they run away like that,” a former North Carolina slave
reminisced. "They had to save their selves. I ’member they [the Yankees]
took one old boss man and hung him up in a tree across a drain of water....
Those white folks had to run away.” Still other slaves came away with
contempt for their masters for having fled and abandoned them, while
some thought it highly amusing, even ludicrous, and most certainly an
admission of defeat. The scene lent itself, in fact, to one of the most popular
wartime songs, "Kingdom Cornin’,” in which it was even suggested that
some of the fleeing masters tried to pass themselves off as "contrabands.”

Say, darkies , hab you seen de massa,

Wid de muffstash on his face,

Go along de road some time dis mornin \

Like he gwine to leab de place?

He seen a smoke way up de ribber,

Whar de Linkum gunboats lay.

112

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

He took his hat „ an’ lef berry sudden.

An’ I spec’ he run away!

CHORUS

De massa run! ha, ha!

De darkey stay! ho, ho!

It mus’ be now de kingdom cornin’

An’ de year ob Jubilo!

He six foot one way, two foot tudder,

An’ he weigh free hundred pound.

His coat so big, he couldn’t pay de tailor.
An’ it won’t go halfway round .

He drill so much, dey call him Cap’n,

An’ he get so drefful tanned,

I spec’ he try an’ fool dem Yankees,

For to tink he’s contraband.

De darkeys feel so berry lonsome,

Libing in de log house on de lawn.

Dey move dar tings to massa’s parlor,

For to keep it while he’s gone.

Dar’s wine an’ cider in de kitchen.

An’ de darkeys dey’ll hab some;

I spose dey’ll all be confiscated.

When de Linkum sojers come.

De oberseer he make us trouble.

An’ he dribe us round a spell;

We lock him up in de smoke-house cellar,
Wid de key trown in de well.

De whip is lost, de han’cuff broken,

But de massa’ll hab his pay.

He’s old enuff, big enuff, ought to know better
Dan to went an’ run away . 15

Nor did the irony of their masters suddenly becoming fugitives seem to
escape the slaves. In the newspaper edited by Frederick Douglass, who had
himself once been a fugitive, there appeared an advertisement purportedly
written by a slave in Beaufort, South Carolina, offering a reward for the
return of his "runaway master.” Whatever the authenticity of the item, the
point could not have been made more graphically.

$500 REWARD.—Rund away from me on the 7th of dis month, my massa
Julian Rhett. Massa Rhett am five feet ’leven inches high, big shoulders,
brack hair, curly, shaggy whiskers, low forehead an’ dark face. He make
big fuss when he go ’mong de gemmen, he talk very big, an’ use de name
ob de Lord all de time. Calls heself "Suddern gemmen,” but I ’spose will
try now to pass heself off as a black man or mulatter. Massa Rhett has

Kingdom Cornin’

113

a deep scar on his shoulder, from a fight, scratch ’cross de left eye, made
by Dinah when he tried to whip her. He neber look people in de face. I
more dan spec he will make track for Bergen kounty, in the furrin land
of Jersey, whar I ’magin he hab a few friends.

I will [give] $100 for him if alive, an’ $500 if anybody show [him] dead.
If he come back to his kind niggers without much trouble, dis chile will
receive him lubbingly.

SAMBO RHETT

Beaufort, S.C., Nov. 9,1861 16

Before a master fled, he might entrust the plantation or town house
to some responsible slave, usually the driver or house servants, in the hope
that his property could be kept intact until his return. Such confidence in
most instances was not betrayed, with the slaves demonstrating what few
masters had willingly conceded them—the ability to look after themselves
and the plantation without any whites to advise or direct them. If the
able-bodied hands had been removed earlier, however, the only remaining
slaves were apt to be "the old and sickly,” the very young, and a few house
servants. This could result in a precarious existence, particularly in those
regions where the dreaded "paterollers” and Confederate guerrillas were
active. In the Mississippi River parishes, the frequency with which the
slaves left on abandoned plantations were kidnapped, taken to Texas, and
sold finally forced the governor to send troops to curtail such activity and,
if possible, to recover the slaves. 17

When white families abandoning the plantations tried to take slaves
with them, they often encountered the same resistance that had greeted
earlier attempts to remove slaves to safer areas. The classic example oc¬
curred early in the war, when the sudden appearance of Union warships
at the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina precipitated a mass
exodus of planters and their families. Despite pleading, threats, and vio¬
lence, however, the slaves stubbornly refused to accompany their owners
to the mainland, many of them hiding in the swamps and fields rather than
be taken. With freedom perhaps only a few hours or days away, this reluc¬
tance was not surprising. After being ordered to row his master to the
mainland, Moses Mitchell, a carpenter and hoer, heeded his wife’s sugges¬
tion to "go out dat back door and keep a-going.” Equally determined, a
slave named Susannah, valued as the fa mil y seamstress, refused to leave
with her master and mistress despite their dire warnings about what would
happen if she remained. Several days later, when her master’s son re¬
turned and ordered the slaves to destroy the cotton lest it fall into the
hands of the Union Army, they refused to cooperate. "Why for we burn de
cotton?” they asked. "Where we get money then for buy clo’ and shoes and
salt?” Rather than bum the cotton, the slaves took turns guarding it, "the
women keeping watch and the men ready to defend it when the watchers
gave the alarm.” In some instances, however, slaves who resisted removal
were shot down, even burned to death in the cotton houses. On Edisto

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Island, where a Confederate raiding party had tried to remove some blacks,
"the women fought so violently when they were t akin g off the men, a
white Charlestonian wrote, "that they were obliged to shoot some of
them.” 18

Not only did the areas of comparative safety within the Confederacy
shrink with the advance of the Union Army but there were more compell¬
ing reasons why most slaveholding f amili es chose not to flee. To stay was
to try to save their homes and plantations from destruction and to preserve
their slaves from the fearful epidemic whites diagnosed as "demoraliza¬
tion.” By remaining at home, a Mississippi planter decided, he would be in
a position to prevent his slaves "from denuding my place.” Henry W.
Ravenel of South Carolina entertained more lofty thoughts. Still imbued
with the old paternalism, he thought it wrong—morally as well as practi-
cally—to desert his slaves at this time. "We know that if left to themselves,
they cannot maintain their happy condition. We must reward their fidelity
to us by the gam* care & consideration we exercised when they were more
useful.” Apart from economic considerations, slavery had long been de¬
fended as a necessary instrument of social control that benefited both
races. And now, with the Yankees not far away, some slaveholders deemed
it their duty to protect their blacks from vices that would inevitably accom¬
pany liberation and freedom. 18

Whether the master and mistress chose to stay or flee, they might
lecture the slaves on how to behave when the Yankees arrived. Although
they were to avoid impertinence, that did not require them to welcome the
invaders as they did most guests. Traditional plantation hospitality was to
be extended most discriminately. "Dey ain’t our company,” a former North
Carolina slave remembered being told. A Virginia master, after reciting
the "barbarities” of the Yankees, threatened to punish anyone who sug¬
gested to the enemy that they had not been content as slaves. "Dey tol’ us
to tell ’em how good dey been to us,” a former Alabama slave recalled, "an’
dat we liked to live wid ’em.” Rivana Boynton, who had been a house slave
on a plantation near Savannah, remembered the day her mistress, Mollie
Hoover, assembled the slaves and instructed them on what to tell the
approaching Yankees. "If they ask you whether I’ve been good to you, you
tell ’em 'yes.’ If they ask you if we give you meat, you say 'yes.’ ” Most of
the slaves did not get any meat, the former servant recalled, "but I did,
’cause I worked in the house. So I didn’t tell a lie, for I did git meat.” Most
importantly, the white family warned the slaves not to divulge where the
valuables had been hidden, no matter what the Yankees told them. "We
knowed enough to keep our mouths shut,” a former Georgia slave re¬
marked. But a Tennessee slave, named Jule, who claimed not to fear the
Union soldiers, had some different ideas. As the Yankees neared the plan¬
tation, the mistress commanded the slaves to remain loyal. "If they find
that trunk o’ money or silver plate,” she asked Jule, "you’ll say it’s your’n,
won’t you?” The slave stood there, obviously unmoved by her mistress’s
plea. "Mistress,” she replied, "I can’t lie over that; you bo’t that silver plate
when you sole my three children.” 80

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115

When the Union Army was nearby, slaves were quick to discern any
changes in the disposition of their owners. In some places, the frequency
and the severity of punishments abated, and the masters—perhaps feanng
slave retaliation—assumed a more benign attitude, prepared for the even¬
tuality of free labor, and even offered to pay wages. After the Ymikees had
been sighted less than two miles away, a Tennessee planter who had beaten
one of his slaves that morning apologized to him and begged him not to
desert. But as slaves had learned so well, usually from bitter personal
experience, the moods of their "white folks” were capable of violent fluc¬
tuations. If the wartime disruptions, privations, and casualties had earlier
provoked fits of anger, the impending disaster they now faced and the
knowledge that they were about to lose both the war and their slaves
rendered even some usually self-possessed whites unable to contain their
emotions. That was how Katie Darling, a nurse and housegirl on a lexas
plantation, recalled her mistress. When the Yankees drew near, missy go
off in a rage. One time when a cannon fire, she say to me. You li 1 blac
wench, you niggers ain’t gwine be free. You’s made to work for wlnte
folks.’ ” A former Georgia slave recalled a '"good master who broke under
the strain and tension that preceded the Union soldiers. "Marse William
ain’t eber hit one of us a single lick till de day when we heard dat de
Yankees was a’comin’.” When one of the slaves jumped up and shouted
"Lawd bless de Yankees” on that day, the master lost his composure.
Shouting "God damn de Yankees,” he slapped the slave repeatedly. Ever -
body got outen dar in a hurry an’ nobody else dasen’t say Yankees ter de

marster.” 21

Not knowing what to expect of the invading army but fearing the
worst, white families, in those final days and hours, often verged on panic
and hysteria. At least that was how some of their slaves perceived them.
In exasperation, masters were known to have lashed out at men and
women who were too quick to celebrate their imminent release from bond¬
age, while others refused to acknowledge either defeat or emancipation.
After hearing of a new Confederate setback in the vicinity, Katie Rowe s
master mounted his horse and rode out onto the plantation where the
slaves were hoeing the corn. He instructed the overseer to assemble the
hands around the lead row man—"dat my own uncle Sandy —and what
he told them on that occasion Katie Rowe could recall vividly many years

later.

You niggers been seeing de ’Federate soldiers coming by here looking
purty raggedy and hurt and wore out, but dat no sign dey licked. Dem
Yankees ain’t gwine git dis fur, but iffen dey do you all am t gwine git
free by ’em, ’cause I gwine free you befo’ dat. When dey git here dey going
find you already free, ’cause I gwine line you up on de bank of Bois d Arc
Creek and free you wid my shotgun! Anybody miss jest one lick wid de
hoe, or one step in de line, or one clap of dat bell, or one toot of de horn,
and he gwine be free and talking to de debil long befo’ he ever see a pan
of blue britches!

116

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Not long after that warning, the master was "Mowed all to pieces” in a
boiler explosion, "and dey jest find little bitsy chunks of his clothes and
parts of him to bury.” And when the Yankees finally arrived, the overseer
who had previously terrorized them "git sweet as honey in de comb! Nobody
git a whipping all de time de Yankees dar !” 22

Looking on with a growing sense of incredulity, slaves observed the
desperation, the anguish, the helplessness that marked the faces and ac¬
tions of their "wMte folks.” A Tennessee slave recalled how her mistress,
at the sight of Union gunboats, suddenly "got wild-like” and "was cryin'
an’ wringin' her ban's,” while at the same time she kept repeating to her
slaves, "Now, 'member I brought you up!” Although the slaves shared
much of the uncertainty that pervaded the Big House, the quality of their
fears and the anticipation they felt were quite different. When Margaret
Hughes, who had been a young slave in South Carolina, heard that the
Union soldiers were coming, she ran to her aunt for comfort. Much to
Margaret's surprise, she found her in the best of spirits and not at all
dismayed by the news. "Child,” she reassured her, "we going to have such
a good time a settin’ at de white folks' table, a eating off de white folks'
table, and a rocking in de big rocking chair .” 23

With Union soldiers already in the vicinity, Emma Holmes, a twenty-
six-year-old wMte woman of "aristocratic” tastes and breeding, calmly
attended the Methodist services in Camden, South Carolina. On that day,
the Reverend Pritchard delivered a "thoroughly practical sermon” to the
slaves in the audience, drawing his illustrations from "daily life,” warning
them about lying, stealing, cursing, and quarreling, and telling them that
the Yankees had been "sent by the devil.” But, like Job, they were all to
bear their losses. Overhearing her servants discuss the sermon afterwards,
Emma Holmes was both "amused” and "interested,” and concluded "that
good seed had been sowed and was bearing fruit.” The attire worn by many
of the black women at the service, however, deeply distressed her. Rather
than wear "the respectable and becoming handkerchief turban,” they had
appeared "in the most ludicrous and disgustingly tawdry mixture of old
finery, aping their betters most nauseatingly—round hats, gloves and even
lace veils.” They would do best to adopt "a plain, neat dress for the working
classes, as in other countries, and indeed among our country negroes for¬
merly.” Even as the death of slavery appeared imminent, the thoughts
uppermost in this woman’s m i nd after attending church that day hardly
conceded as much. "If I ever own negroes, I shall carry out my father's plan
and never allow them to indulge in dress—it is ruin body and soul to
them .” 24

The appearance of the first Yankee soldier symbolized far more than
the humiliation of m ili tary defeat. No matter how certain they were of
their own slaves, nearly every master and mistress sensed that the old
loyalties and mutual dependencies were about to become irrelevant. "Ne¬
gro slavery is about played out,” John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter,
observed, "we being deprived of that Control needful to make them happy

Kingdom Cornin'

117

and prosperous.” And Sarah Morgan, the daughter of a slaveholding fam¬
ily, could find solace only in recalling the past. "No more cotton, sugar¬
cane, or rice!” she lamented. "No more old black aunties or uncles! No more
rides in mule teams, no more songs in the cane-field, no more steaming
kettles, no more black faces and shining teeth around the furnace fires!”
The previous night, she had sat around the fire with a crowd of family
slaves, singing with them, enjoying their company. "Poor oppressed
devils!” she thought. "Why did you not chunk us with the burning logs
instead of looking happy, and laughing like fools ?” 25

Preparing to abandon the family plantation, as the Yankees ap¬
proached, Eliza Andrews took time to note in her journal: "There is no
telling what may happen before we come back; the Yankees may have put
an end to our glorious old plantation life forever.” That night, she paid a
final visit to the slave quarters to bid her blacks farewell. "Poor things, I
may never see any of them again, and even if I do, everything will be
different. We all went to bed crying...” Four months later, returning to
her home, she confided to her journal: "It is necessary to have some nick¬
name to use when we talk before the servants, and to speak very carefully,
even then, for every black man is a possible spy. Father says we must not
even trust mammy too far .” 26

Don't you see the lightning flashing in the cane brakes.

Looks like we gonna have a storm

Although you 're mistaken it's the Yankee soldiers

Going to fight for Uncle Sam.

Old master was a colonel in the Rebel army
Just before he had to run away —

Look out the battle is a-falling
The darkies gonna occupy the land . 27

The long, often excruciating wait was nearly over. On plantations and
farms in the path of the Union Army, the tension and uneasiness, albeit
in different degrees, pervaded both the Big House and the slave quarters.
Mary Brodie, a thirteen-year-old slave in Wake County, North Carolina,
could easily sense the change that had come over the plantation on which
she resided. "Missus and marster began to walk around and act queer. The
grown slaves were whisperin’ to each other. Sometimes they gathered in
little gangs in the grove.” In the next several days, the noise of distant
gunfire grew louder, everybody "seemed to be disturbed,” the slaves walked
about aimlessly, nobody was working, "and marster and missus were cry¬
ing.” Finally, the word went out for every slave to assemble in front of "the
great house.” Sam and Evaline Brodie came out on the porch and stood side

118

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

by side facing their more than 150 slaves. "You could hear a pin drop,”
Mary recalled, "everything was so quiet.” After greeting them, the master
explained why he had called them together. "Men, women and children,
you are free. You are no longer my slaves. The Yankees will soon be here.”
There was no more to be said. The master and mistress went back into the
house, picked up two large armchairs, placed them on the porch facing the
road, and sat down to wait. "In about an hour,” Mary recalled, "there was
one of the blackest clouds coming up the avenue from the main road. It was
the Yankee soldiers.” 28

When Union gunboats were sighted coming up the Combahee River in
South Carolina, the overseer frantically assembled the slaves. "The Yan¬
kees are coming!” he told them. "You must all keep out of sight. Don't let
them see you. If they land near here, cut and run and hide where nobody
can find you. I tell you them Yanks are the very devil! If they catch you
they will sell you to New Orleans or Cuba!” The slaves assured the overseer
that they would run so fast "de Debil hisself” would be unable to catch
them. "Don’t you worry, Massa Jim,” the old slave cook added. "We all hear
’bout dem Yankees. Folks tell we they has horns an’ a tail. I is mighty
skeery myself, an’ I has all my t’ings pick up, an’ w’en I see dem coming
I shall run like all possess.” Reassured, the overseer announced that he was
going to the mainland and would leave everything in their care. The slaves
gathered to watch him ride off. "Good-by, ole man, good-by,” they shouted
as he disappeared down the road. "That’s right. Skedaddle as fas’ as you
kin. When you cotch we ag’in, I ’specs you’ll know it. We’s gwine to run sure
enough; but we knows the Yankees, an’ we runs that way.” And so they did,
directly toward the Union gunboats. 29

When former slaves recalled the war years, what remained most vivid
in their memories—"just as good as it had been dis day right here”—was
that moment when freedom from bondage suddenly became a distinct
possibility in their own lifetimes. The first slaves who experienced that
sensation were usually those whose homes lay in the path of the Union
Army. "We bear’d ’bout de Yankees fightin’ to free us,” remembered Berry
Smith of Mississippi, "but we didn’ b’lieve it ’til we bear’d ’bout de fightin’
at Vicksburg.” When the "freedom gun” was fired, and Sherman’s troops
came through the plantation, Susan Hamilton was scrubbing the floors.
"Dey tell me I wus free but I didn’t b’lieve it.” While driving the cows to
pasture, Rilla Pool, a North Carolina slave, glanced down the railroad
tracks and "everything was blue”; she ran home to tell the others, and
heard her grandmother exclaim, "Well I has been prayin’ long enough for
’em [and] now dey is here.” Hester Hunter, a South Carolina slave, recalled
the day her grandmother ran into the house with news that the Yankees
were on their way, after which the mistress screamed, fetched her valu¬
ables, and told the slave to sew them up in the feather bed. Still another
South Carolina slave was about to be whipped by his master for misconduct
when they heard the shout that Union gunboats were coming up the river;
both fled, but in opposite directions. 30

Kingdom Cornin'

119

Uncertainty, skepticism, and fear marked the initial reaction of many
slaves to the Yankee invaders. The first impulse was often to hide. "I done
what all of de rest o’ de slaves done,” recalled a former slave who had fled
to the nearby woods. Young Margaret Lavine remembered how her mother
grabbed her in her arms; indeed, some slave women ordered their children
to bed, told them to feign illness, and warned the Union soldiers not to
enter the cabin because "dere’s de fever in heah!” Neither ignorance nor
devotion to their "white folks” necessarily explains the caution with which
many slaves greeted their liberators. The activities of the much-feared
"paterollers,” who roamed the countryside to keep the blacks in check, had
already made the slaves exceedingly wary of approaching strangers, even
those claiming to be Yankees; the citizens’ patrols, as well as Confederate
guerrillas (sometimes wearing Yankee uniforms), were known to have
beaten and murdered slaves who mistook them for Union soldiers and
prematurely rejoiced over their liberation, and some slaves had been
tricked into giving information to alleged Yankees, only to find themselves
strung up as spies and informers. Many a slave suffered, too, at the hands
of white stragglers and deserters, and General Joe Wheeler’s Confederate
cavalry had become notorious for the ways in which it pillaged and terror¬
ized the countryside, leaving in some areas of South Carolina and North
Carolina little for the Yankees to plunder. "Dey was ’Federates but dey was
mean as de Yankees,” Sarah Debro recalled. "Dey ax de niggahs if dey
wanted to be free. If dey say yes, den dey shot dem down, but if dey say no,
dey let dem alone. Dey took three of my uncles out in de woods an’ shot dey
faces off.” 31

If the approaching soldiers were, in fact, Yankees, there remained
compelling reasons why the slaves might act cautiously. Although freedom
appeared to be at hand, uncertainty about what forms that freedom would
take, how their "liberators” would treat them, and what would happen to
them once the soldiers departed suggested the need to adopt that noncom¬
mittal stance that had served them so well in relations with the "white
folks.” Realizing that their master would most likely regain control after
the soldiers moved on, slaves had good reason to fear that a terrible revenge
might be visited upon those who behaved contrary to expectations. Despite
reassurances by General Sherman himself that the Yankees came as
friends, an elderly Georgia slave remained skeptical. "I spose dat you’se
true,” he told the General; "but, massa, you’se ’ll go way to-morrow, and
anudder white man ’ll come.” Experience with both Yankees and Confeder¬
ates led one former slave to conclude, "Dem "Blue-coats’ wuz devils, but de
'gray-coats’ wuz wusser,” and it prompted many slaves to maintain a safe
distance between themselves and either army.

One night there’d be a gang of Secesh, and the next one, there’d come
along a gang of Yankees. Pa was ’fraid of both of ’em. Secesh said they’d
kill ’im if he left his white folks. Yankees said they’d kill ’im if he didn’t
leave ’em. He would hide out in the cotton patch and keep we children
out there with him . 32

120

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

If a slave chose to believe only half of what he had been told about the
approaching Union soldiers, there was every reason to be apprehensive. On
the day the Yankees were expected, Betty Roach, a housegirl and nurse for
the children on a small plantation in Tennessee, asked how she might be
able to tell them apart from other whites. That would be easy, her mistress
explained. "They got long horns on their heads, and tushes in their mouths,
and eyes sticking out like a cow! They’re mean old things. And Betty—if
they come to the house, don’t dare tell them the babies’ names—you hear?
[The children had been named after two prominent Confederate generals.]
If you do, they will kill the babies—and you too!” This same woman had
previously assured Betty that if she worked hard and behaved herself, she
would eventually turn white. Not at all uncommon, then, was the experi¬
ence of a Union officer near Opelousas, Louisiana, when he wandered off
the road to a shed in search of a cup of water. Seeing him, the slave women
and children fled, leaving behind a small child who was trying desperately
to join the others. The officer patted the child on the head and tried to
assure him that he was perfectly safe. Emerging from their hiding places,
the slaves who had run away explained that their master and mistress had
told them that Union soldiers killed black children, sometimes even
roasted and ate them. 33

Since the outbreak of the war, white families had tried to frighten
their slaves about the consequences of Yankee occupation, warning them
to expect atrocities, forced labor, and military conscription. Since some
slaves had come to expect anything of white men and women, the terrifying
images of Yankee white devils might have seemed entirely plausible. But
the slave’s perception of his master and mistress, based on years of close
observation, and the information he gathered from a variety of alternative
sources provided ample grounds for skepticism if not outright disbelief.
Even with a limited access to the news, many slaves dismissed the atrocity
stories because they simply made no sense. "Massa can’t come dat over
we,” a Georgia slave told a Union officer; "we know’d a heap better. What
for de Yankees want to hurt black men? Massa hates de Yankees, and he’s
no fren’ ter we; so we am de Yankee bi’s fren’s.” After hearing those direful
predictions of a Yankee hell, Aunt Sally, a Virginia slave, assumed a
"darky” countenance and assured her mistress that there was nothing to
fear from the enemy soldiers. "I done tell her what’d dey go to do to an ol’
good-for-nuffin nigger like me. Dey wouldn’t hab no use for me, I’se think-
in’. I’ll stay by de stuff.” The same master who warned his slaves about the
Yankees, moreover, might have also boasted of the invincibility of Confed¬
erate arms, assuring them that the war would be brief and victorious. Why
should they place any more confidence in their master’s word now than
they had before? "They told her a heap more’n she believed,” a Louisiana
freedwoman remarked after the war. 34 And if the Yankees brought with
them a promise of freedom, as everyone seemed to concede, why should the
slaves fear them?

The first glimpse usually convinced even the more skeptical slaves, if

Kingdom Cornin'

121

not their masters, that the Yankees, in physical appearance at least, were
less than the monsters they had been warned to expect. "Why dey’s folks,”
one slave shouted with delight, as she ran down the road to greet them. Not
knowing what he might see, Abram Harris, a former South Carolina slave,
remembered his surprise at discovering that the Yankees were "jes lak my
white folks.” Still not entirely convinced, Mittie Freeman, who had been
a slave in Mississippi, recalled how she refused to come down from a tree
until the Union soldier had removed his hat to show her he had no horns.
Lingering suspicions of white men, whether Yankees or Confederates, were
not always so easily set aside. Although anxious to celebrate their freedom,
Gus Askew and his friends preferred not to do so in the presence of the
Yankees. "We went on away from the so’jers and had a good time ’mongst
ourselves, like we always done when there wasn’t any cotton pickin’.” The
slaves were sometimes more restrained in their welcomes if their master
or mistress happened to be present, and that may also account for the
indifference with which some disappointed Yankees thought they had been
received. "On our way up from Carrollton,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote,
"one [slave] got the woodpile between him and the whites, and then vigor¬
ously waved his hat in welcome. It was our only welcome.” 35

If the Yankees’ physical appearance seemed reassuring, the promise
of freedom they had come to symbolize overcame for scores of slaves any
doubts or suspicions. Without the slightest hesitation, many of them
flocked to the roadsides, waved their hats and bonnets, greeted the soldiers
with shouts of "God bress you; I is glad to see you,” threw their arms about
in jubilation, stretched out their hands to touch them, even tried to hug
them. "Massa say dis bery mornin’, 'De damn Yankees nebber get up to
here!’ ” a slave in the Teche country of Louisiana shouted at the passing
troops, "but I knowed better; we all knowed better dan dat. We’s been
prayin’ too long to de Lord to have him forgit us; and now you’se come, and
we all free.” At the sight of Sherman’s army, one slave recalled, the whites
fled to the woods and most of the slaves ran to their cabins, "but I’se on top
o’ a pine stub, ten feet high, an’ I’se jes’ shoutin’ 'Glory to God! take me wid
ye! Glory to God! Glory Glory!’ ” Eliza Sparks, who had been a slave in
Mathews County, Virginia, recalled most vividly the Union officer who
wanted to know the name of the baby she was nursing. "Charlie, like his
father,” she told him. "Charlie what?” the officer asked. "I tole him Charlie
Sparks.” After presenting the baby with a copper coin, the officer rode off,
but not before bidding the slave a farewell she would long remember.
"Goodbye, Mrs. Sparks,” he yelled. That was what impressed her. "Now
what you think of dat? Dey all call me 'Mrs. Sparks’!” 36

When the Yankees entered Charleston, a sixty-nine-year-old slave
woman greeted them with a simple, repetitive chant:

Ye’s long been a-comin’.

Yes long been a-comin

Ye’s long been a-comin

For to take de land .

122

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

And now ye’s a-comin’,

And now ye’s a cornin’,

And now ye’s a-comin’,

For to rule de land

That the coming of the Yankees should have been suffused with religious
significance for many slaves is hardly surprising. "Us looked for the Yan¬
kees on dat place,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, "like us look
now for de Savior and de host of angels at de second cornin’.” To the elderly,
those who had endured nearly a lifetime of bondage, what they were now
witnessing appeared to be nothing less than acts of divine intervention,
with the Yankees cast as "Jesus’s Aids,” General Sherman as Moses, and
Lincoln as "de Messiah.” That was the only way some slaves could explain
what was happening to them, the only way they could render comprehensi¬
ble these remarkable and dramatic events. Seldom had their prayers been
answered so concretely. "I’d always thought about this, and wanted this
day to come, and prayed for it and knew God meant it should be here
sometime,” a Savannah slave declared as she shook her head in disbelief,
"but I didn’t believe I should ever see it, and it is so great and good a thing,
I cannot believe it has come now; and I don’t believe I ever shall realize it,
but I know it has though, and I bless the Lord for it.” 37

But the arrival of the Yankees on many plantations and farms came
to be viewed, by slaves and their owners alike, as the visitation of God s
wrath. The soldiers would assemble the white family and the slaves, de¬
mand to know where the valuables were hidden, threaten them if they
refused to divulge the information, and then commence to ransack the
entire plantation, venting their anger on whatever or whoever got in the
way. "De worst time we ever had,” recalled Fannie Griffin, who had been
a slave in South Carolina. "De Yankees ’stroyed ’most everything we had.”
On the plantation in Alabama where Walter Calloway worked as a plow
hand, Confederate soldiers had already taken off the best livestock, making
it "purty hard on bofe whites an’ blacks,” but the Yankees proved to be
even more thorough, "smashin’ things cornin’ an’ gwine.” 3 *

What the Yankees did not take they might distribute among the
slaves, even urging them to join in the pillaging. With their restricted diet
having been further reduced by wartime scarcities, some slaves found it
impossible to resist the invitation to partake of the food supply created by
their own labor or the Big House furnishings accumulated through genera¬
tions of their unpaid labor. When the soldiers broke open the storeroom on
the Pooshee plantation in South Carolina, the slaves seized nearly every¬
thing in sight, much to the shock of the owner, who had to witness the
scene. Afterwards, his granddaughter informed a friend of what had hap¬
pened: "It must have been too mortifying to poor Grand Pa for his negroes
to behave as they did, taking the bread out of our mouths. I thought better
of them than that.” After the Yankees passed through her rice plantations,
Adele Allston learned that the blacks had divided among themselves the

Kingdom Cornin’

123

furniture and livestock. But even when slaves were afforded these rare
opportunities, their behavior defied predictability; many of them refused
to have anything to do with such "looting” and were reluctant to accept any
of the master’s property. In some instances, the slaves took what the sol¬
diers gave them, so as not to anger them, but subsequently returned the
goods to their owners, whether out of loyalty or because they feared the
repercussions once the Union Army moved on. 39

When Yankee troops looted the Morgan home in Baton Rouge, a faith¬
ful servant stood all he could before he exclaimed, "Ain’t you shamed to
destroy all dis here, that belongs to a poor widow lady who’s got two
daughters to support?” No matter how each slave felt inwardly, the sight
of Yankees pillaging the plantation and perhaps humiliating the white
residents had to be a unique experience. The way the soldiers "jes’ natch-
erly tore up ol’ Marster’s place,” as though they had a "special vengeance”
for their "white folks,” left many slaves quite incredulous. So did the
treatment of the women.

Upstairs dey didn’t even have de manners to knock at Mist’ess’ door. Dey
just walked right on in whar my sister, Lucy, wuz combin’ Mist’ess’ long
pretty hair. They told Lucy she wuz free now and not to do no more work
for Mist’ess. Den all of’em grabbed dey big old rough hands into Mist’ess’
hair, and dey made her walk down stairs and out in de yard, and all de
time dey wuz a-pullin’ and jerkin’ at her long hair ...

With equal "impertinence,” the soldiers might force the white women to
prepare meals and serve both them and the slaves. That was a sight Mary
Ella Grandberry, a former Alabama slave, would never forget. "De Yan¬
kees made ’em do for us lak we done for dem. Dey showed de white folks
what it was to work for somebody else.” 40

Upon observing "the gloomy ebony scowl” on the faces of the slaves,
a Union officer thought it arose from "jealousy at the liberties, token by
us, with what they consider their own plantations and possessions.” He was
no doubt correct in his assumption. The slaves might have marveled at the
audacity of the Yankees, and some perhaps derived pleasure from the
discomfiture of their owners, but the indiscriminate and wasteful destruc¬
tion of the food supply and what many regarded as their home struck them
as excessive and unnecessary. The Yankees called it a holy war, a former
South Carolina slave observed, "but they and Wheeler’s men was a holy
terror to dis part of de world, as naked and hungry as they left it.” It was
the pillaging, a former Mississippi slave recalled, that turned him against
the Yankees, and he shared, too, the resentment of numerous blacks that
the soldiers destroyed what they had worked so hard to produce. "We
helped raise that meat they stole. They left us to starve and fed their fat
selves on what was our living.” No less disturbing had been those planters
and Confederate soldiers who had ordered the destruction of crops rather
than leave them to the Yankees. "It made my innards hurt,” Charlie

124

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Davenport recalled, "to see fire ’tached to somethin’ dat had cost us Niggers
so much labor an’ hones’ sweat.” 41

What compounded the bitterness was that the Yankees pillaged both
whites and blacks, the Big House and the slave cabins alike. "The negroes
all share the same fate as ourselves,” Emma Holmes noted after the Yan¬
kees had passed through Camden, South Carolina, "everything ransacked
and whatever was wanted stolen, though the Yankees told them they had
come to free them and called them 'sis,’ talking most familiarly.” That they
should be robbed and defrauded by those who claimed to be their liberators,
that their eahins should be searched and ransacked, their wives and daugh¬
ters insulted and abused, came as a shocking revelation to many slaves,
leaving them both angry and confused. "I always bin hear dat de Yankees
was gwine help de nigger!” one of the Allston servants exclaimed to her
mistress after the Yankees had seized her few possessions. "W’a’ kynd a
help yu call dis! Tek ebery ting I got in de wurld.” The depth of black
disillusionment with the Yankees is suggested by the number of slaves who
compared them to the much-despised and degraded poor whites. "By in¬
stinct,” Andy Brice of South Carolina observed, "a nigger can make up his
mind pretty quick ’bout de creed of white folks, whether they am buckra
or whether they am not. Every Yankee I see had de stamp of poor white
trash on them.” Perhaps that was what a Mississippi slave had in mind
after a Union soldier had addressed her as "Auntie.” "Don’t you call me
'Auntie,’ ” she retorted, "I ain’t none o’ yo’ kin.” 42

With considerable ingenuity, based on years of experience with their
own "white folks,” some slaves managed to preserve their few possessions
from the clutches of the Yankees. In Camden, South Carolina, for example,
the soldiers seized the blankets belonging to an elderly black shoemaker.
But he proved more than equal to the crisis. Feigning "a tone of terror,”
he warned them not to mix his blankets with theirs, "as all the house girls
had some catching disease.” On hearing this, the alarmed Yankees not only
returned the blankets but presented the black with the mule on which they
had placed the loot. Equally artful were the servants in the Mary S. Mal¬
lard household in Montevideo, Georgia, who sought both to avoid conscrip¬
tion into the Union Army and to save their belongings.

From being a young girl she [the cook] had assumed the attitude and
appearance of a sick old woman, with a blanket thrown over her head and
shoulders, and scarcely able to move. Their devices are various and amus¬
ing. Gilbert keeps a sling under his coat and slips his arm into it as soon
as they appear; Charles walks with a stick and limps dreadfully; Niger
a few days since kept them from stealing everything they wanted in his
house by covering up in bed and saying he had "yellow fever”; Mary Ann
kept them from taking the wardrobe of her deceased daughter by calling
out: "Them dead people clothes !” 43

Although the vast majority of slaves welcomed the Union soldiers,
albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, experience would reveal that

Kingdom Cornin’

125

their "liberators,” like their previous owners, might display moments of
kindness, tenderness, generosity, and paternal benevolence but their racial
beliefs and temperaments made them at the same time unpredictable and
capable of a wide range of conduct. When an Arkansas slave confronted a
Yankee who had stolen her quilts, she voiced the frustration of many of her
brethren who had experienced a similar betrayal of expectations: "Why,
you nasty, stinkin’ rascal. You say you come down here to fight for the
niggers, and now you’re stealin’ from ’em.” But the soldier had the final
word, aptly summing up his conception of the war and that of thousands
of his comrades: "You’re a God Damn liar, I’m fightin’ for $14 a month and
the Union.” 44

Before entering the South, few Yankee soldiers had ever seen so many
blacks, such concentrations of them, appearing almost everywhere they
marched. The tens of thousands who greeted them along the roadsides, the
"contrabands” who flocked to their camps, the refugees who followed their
columns, the sullen-looking figures who gazed at them from a distance
provided most Union soldiers with their initial view of the "peculiar insti¬
tution.” It was as if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s characters had suddenly
materialized before their very eyes. "I never saw a bunch of them to¬
gether,” a Wisconsin youth wrote, "but I could pick out an Uncle Tom, a
Quimbo, a Sambo, a Chloe, an Eliza or any other character in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.” 45

Although curious about what he would find in the South, the average
Union soldier brought with him certain notions about black people, based
largely on the racial beliefs and exaggerated caricatures with which he had
been inculcated since childhood. His first impressions of the slaves he
encountered invariably confirmed and reinforced those caricatures, and
the descriptions he provided the folks at home dwelled upon them. If any¬
thing, their physical "peculiarities” struck him as even more pronounced
than he had imagined; they were "so black that 'charcoal would make a
white mark on them,’ ” their mouths were excessively large, their lips
excessively thick, and their noses excessively broad and flat. "They are the
genuine Negro here,” a Pennsylvania soldier wrote from South Carolina,
"as bl ac k as tar and their heels stick out a feet behind.” A New England
soldier in Louisiana wrote his brother with a mixture of revulsion and
attraction: "If I marry any one at all I believe I’ll marry one of these nigger
wenches down here. One that grease runs right off of, one that shines and
one that stinks so you can smell her a mile, and then you can have time
to get out of the way.” Such disparagements were neither uncommon nor
limited to Negrophobes. Even those Yankee soldiers who claimed to be
antislavery expressed their amusement at the physical appearance and

126

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

demeanor of the enslaved blacks, revealing more about their own back¬
grounds and biases than about the objects of their sympathy. "There is
something irresistibly comical in their appearance,” wrote one such sol¬
dier, "they are so black, and their teeth are of such dazzling whiteness,
their eyes so laughing and rolling, their clothes so fantastic, and their
whole appearance so peculiar.” 46

The Yankees expected to find a degraded, inferior, primitive people,
who were at the same time picturesque, comical, indolent, and carefree,
always wearing "a happy and contented expression,” displaying their
broad grins, touching their hats to the white folks, answering questions
politely and humbly. That was the kind of Negro they had seen cavorting
across the minstrel stages of the North and pictured in the popular litera¬
ture, and now they were simply viewing Sambo and Dinah in their natural
habitat. "Until I saw and conversed with the greater number of these
persons,” a northern reporter wrote from South Carolina, "I believed that
the appearance and intelligence of Southern field hands were greatly li¬
beled by the delineators of negro character at the concert saloons. Now I
cannot but acknowledge that instead of gross exaggerations the 'minstrels’
give representations which are faithful to nature. There were the same
grotesque dresses, awkward figures, and immense brogans which are to be
seen every night at Bryant’s or Christy’s.” Nor did the Yankees obviously
expect to find any particular intelligence exhibited by these minstrel-like
characters, quite apart from the laws that barred them from learning to
read or write. Thus did a Union soldier, who was himself barely literate,
inform his parents that the "niggers” he had encountered "dont no as
much as a dumb bruit.” 47

Unlike many southern whites, the Yankees had little awareness of the
complexity of the slave’s demeanor and personality. They still had some
hard lessons to learn in the kind of dissembling and deception that en¬
slaved blacks often practiced on whites. That would come with time and
experience. "One of these blacks, fresh from slavery, will most adroitly tell
you precisely what you want to hear,” a northern journalist discovered in
South Carolina. "To cross-examine such a creature is a task of the most
delicate nature; if you chance to put a leading question he will answer to
its spirit as closely as the compass needle answers to the magnetic pole.”
Still other revelations would emerge with additional exposure to the vari¬
ety of black folk. Although Union soldiers were quick to note the blackness
of the slaves, the gradations in color did not escape them, and the abundant
evidence of miscegenation would evoke considerable comment and curi¬
osity. "Many of the mongrels are very beautiful,” a Massachusetts soldier
conceded, "with their fine hair, straight or wavy, and their blue or dark
eyes, always soft and lustrous and half concealed by the long lashes. They
look more like voluptuous Italians than negroes.” He had been told by one
"Southern gentleman” that the mulattoes were "more docile and affection¬
ate” than "the unmixed negro,” although "less hardy” and "generally
unchaste.” Whatever "handsome” qualities the mulattoes and quadroons

Kingdom, Cornin’

127

possessed, the Yankees naturally attributed them to their white ancestry.
How else could they explain the startling incongruity in the appearance of
a mulatto child with his mother? "Judging by the extreme hideousness of
some of these mothers,” a soldier wrote, "I was led to conclude that South¬
ern passion was superior to Southern taste.” 48

Although the prevailing image pictured blacks as a happy-go-lucky
and carefree race, at best a source of amusement, some Yankee soldiers
ramp away with altogether different impressions. The slaves they saw did
not resemble "the rollicking, joyous, devil-may-care African” they had
anticipated, nor did they hear any of the laughter and jubilant songs that
were said to radiate from the slave cabins. When he had come to the South,
Private Henry T. Johns of Massachusetts, like most of his comrades, had
believed that the blacks, "if not a happy race, were at least careless and
light-hearted.” But the longer he remained in the South, the more skeptical
he became of that stereotype. "I have been with them a great deal,” he
wrote from Louisiana, "and never before saw so much of gloom, despond¬
ency, listlessness. I saw no banjo, heard none but solemn songs. In
church or on the street they impress me with a great sadness. They are a
sombre, not a happy, race.” Several weeks later, when his regiment was
encamped near Baton Rouge, he attended a black religious service and
described the "mingled excitement and devotion,” the shouting, the clap¬
ping of hands, the jumping, the often wild and excited singing. It all im¬
pressed him, however, as "a mournful joy,” and the hymns seemed "more
a loud wail than a burst of joyous melody.”

When praying about their enslaved condition, or for the dying, or for the
salvation of poor sinners, they unitedly break out into the most plaintive
chorus imaginable. I can’t describe it, but to my dying hour I shall re¬
member it. It seemed like the incarnation of sadness. I could think of
nothing but a mother in heaven wailing for her lost son.... Almost like
a nightmare it clings to me, ever presenting depths of sadness and resig¬
nation beyond my conception . 49

The degree of enthusiasm with which slaves greeted their "liberators”
created something of a paradox. If they acted indifferently or hostilely, as
some did, the Yankees concluded they were too ignorant to appreciate or
recognize freedom. But if they were effusive in their response, the Union
soldiers often mocked their behavior. The typical Yankee was at best a
reluctant liberator, and the attitudes and behavior he evinced did not
always encourage the slaves to think of themselves as free men and women.
Although Union propagandists and abolitionists might exult in how a war
for the Union had been transformed into a crusade for freedom, many
northern soldiers donned the crusader’s armor with strong misgivings or
outright disgust. "I dont think enough of the Niggar to go and fight for
them,” an Ohio private wrote. "I would rather fight them.” Few Northern¬
ers, after all, had chosen to wage this kind of war. "Our government has

128

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

broken faith with us,” a Union deserter told his captors. "We enlisted to
fight for the Union, and not to liberate the G-d d—d niggers.” Rather than
view emancipation as a way to end the war, some Yankee soldiers thought
it would only prolong the conflict. Now that the very survival of the south¬
ern labor system was at stake, not to mention the proper subordination of
black people, the prospect of a negotiated peace seemed even more remote,
and southern whites could be expected to fight with even greater intensity
and conviction. 50

That most Union soldiers should have failed to share the abolitionist
commitment is hardly surprising. What mattered was how they manifested
their feelings when they came into direct contact with the slaves. The
evidence suggests one of the more tragic chapters in the history of this
generally brutalizing and demoralizing war. The normal frustrations of
military life and the usually sordid record of invading armies, when com¬
bined with long-held and deeply felt attitudes toward black people, were
more than sufficient to turn some Union soldiers into the very "debils” the
slaves had been warned by their masters to expect. Not only did the invad¬
ers tend to view the Negro as a primary cause of the war but even more
importantly as an inferior being with few if any legitimate human emo¬
tions—at least none that had to be considered with any degree of sen¬
sitivity. Here, then, was a logical and convenient object on which
disgruntled and war-weary Yankees could vent their frustrations and ha¬
treds. "As I was going along this afternoon,” a young Massachusetts officer
wrote from New Orleans, "a little black baby that could just walk got under
my feet and it look so much like a big worm that I wanted to step on it and
crush it, the nasty, greasy little vermin was the best that could be said of
it.” And if anything, additional exposure to blacks appeared to strengthen
rather than allay racial antipathies. "My repugnance to them increases
with the acquaintance,” a New England officer remarked. "Republican as
I am, keep me clear of the darkey in any relation.” Praying for an early
end to the war, a Union soldier stationed in Missouri declared that he had
had his fill of colored people. "I never want to see one of the animals after
I leave here.” 51

The thousands of slaves who flocked to the Union lines were apt to
encounter the same prejudices, the same exploitation, the same disparage¬
ment, the same capacity for sadistic cruelty which they thought they had
left behind them on the plantations and farms. To belittle the slave’s
character, dress, language, name, and demeanor, to make him the butt of
their humor, to ridicule his aspirations, to mock his religious worship, to
exploit his illiteracy were ways of passing the duller moments of camp life
and military occupation. Besides, the manipulation ofblacks for the amuse¬
ment of white audiences had a long and accepted tradition behind it.
"There were five negroes in our mess room last night,” a New England
soldier wrote from Virginia, "we got them to sing and dance! Great times.
Negro concerts free of expense here.” Sarah Debro, who had been a slave

Kingdom Cornin'

129

in North Carolina, recalled the Yankee soldiers who threatened to shoot
her toes off unless she danced for them, and other former slaves remem¬
bered, too, how the Yankees forced them to sing and dance and called them
'Tunny names.” The soldiers who shared in these diversions did so regard¬
less of their feelings about slavery and emancipation. Henry M. Cross
constantly deplored racist sentiment in his regiment; what he had seen of
the slaves, he wrote, made him despise even more intensely the bondage
"which has brought them to their miserable condition.” But even as he
made that comment, Private Cross wrote of a sixteen-year-old black youth
attached to the adjutant in his camp:

He is filthy and lazy and seems to know as much as a child of four years,
and yet once in a while shows gleams of intelligence beyond his years and
condition. He never looks at you when talking, but shifts uneasily from
one leg to the other and turns his head from side to side, rolling his eyes
and grunting queer laughs. We make all kinds of sport of him . 52

To strip the slave of his dignity and self-respect was not enough. Some
Yankees exploited his ignorance and trust to defraud him of what little
money or worldly goods he possessed. They might, for example, persuade
him to exchange his money for certificates that turned out to be soap
wrappers, or sell him equally worthless passes that permitted him to travel
freely, or offer for a price to reunite him with his family. Some slaves were
less gullible than the Yankees thought but were in no position to challenge
their authority, while a few slaves managed to turn the tables on their
liberators, like the elderly black man who claimed to be the original Uncle
Tom and sold a souvenir-hunting Yankee the whip with which he had
allegedly been beaten. 53

To debauch black women, some Yankees apparently concluded, was to
partake of a widely practiced and well-accepted southern pastime. The
evidence was to be seen everywhere. Besides, Yankees tended to share the
popular racist notion of black women as naturally promiscuous and disso¬
lute. "Singular, but true,” a Massachusetts soldier and amateur phrenolo¬
gist observed, "the heads of the women indicate great animal passions.”
Although some Union officers made no secret of their slave concubines,
sharing their quarters with them, a black soldier noted that they usually
mingled with "deluded freedwomen” only under the cover of darkness,
while they openly consorted with white women during the day. The fre¬
quency with which common soldiers mixed with black women prompted
some regimental commanders to order the ejection of such women from the
camp because their presence had become "demoralizing. ” "I won’t be un¬
faithful to you with a Negro wench,” a Pennsylvania soldier assured his
wife, "though it is the case with many soldiers. Yes, men who have wives
at home get entangled with these black things.” Marriages between Yan¬
kees and blacks were rare, but when they did occur southern whites made
the most of them.

130

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Two of the Brownfields former negroes have married Yankees—one, a
light colored mustee, had property left her by some white man whose
mistress she had been—she says she passed herself off for a Spaniard and
Mprripr Green violated the sanctity of Grace Church by performing the
ceremony—the other, a man, went north and married a Jewess—the idea
is too revolting.

Not surprisingly, Union soldiers often shared the outrage of local whites
at such liaisons. In November 1865, a black newspaper in Charleston re¬
ported that an Illinois soldier had been tarred and feathered by his own
comrades for having married a black woman. "He was probably a Southern
man by birth and education,” the newspaper said of the victim, "and Hoo-
siers and Suckers don’t take readily to Southern habits.” 54

Whatever the reputation of black women for promiscuity, sexual sub¬
mission frequently had to be obtained by force. "While on picket guard I
witnessed misdeeds that made me ashamed of America,” a soldier wrote
from South Carolina; he had recently observed a group of his comrades
rape a nine-year-old black girl. Not only did some Union soldiers sexually
assault any woman they found in a slave cabin but they had no compunc¬
tions about committing the act in the presence of her fa m i l y. "The father
and grandfather dared offer no resistance,” two witnesses reported from
Virginia. In some such instances, the husband or children of the intended
victim had to be forcibly restrained from coming to her assistance. Beyond
the exploitation of sexual assault, black women could be subjected to fur¬
ther brutality and sadism, as was most graphically illustrated in an inci¬
dent involving some Connecticut soldiers stationed in Virginia. After
seizing two "niger wenches,” they "turned them upon their heads, & put
tobacco, chips, stocks, lighted cigars & sand into their behinds.” Without
explanation, some Union soldiers in Hanover County, Virginia, stopped
five young black women and cut their arms, legs, and backs with razors.
"Dis was new to us,” one of the victims recalled, "cause Mr. Tinsley [her
master] didn’ ever beat or hurt us.” Most Union soldiers would have found
these practices reprehensible. But they occurred with sufficient frequency
to induce a northern journalist in South Carolina to write that Union
troops had engaged in "some of the vilest and meanest exhibitions of hu¬
man depravity” he had ever witnessed. If such incidents were rare, more¬
over, the racial ideology that encouraged them had widespread acceptance,
even among those who deplored the excesses. 55

The actions of white men could not surprise some blacks. Many of
those who hailed the Yankees as their champions and liberators neverthe¬
less were to experience a rude awakening. In Norfolk, Virginia, the slaves
had rejoiced at the coming of the Yankees. "There was nothing we would
not do for them,” one black resident remarked; "and they knew it, too. We
were humble, grateful and respectful.” But the soldiers destroyed their
property, shot at them, and abused them "in every possible way,” and it
now appeared to him "as if we had no one to protect us, and there’s no thing

Kingdom Cornin’

131

left us but to protect ourselves.” Such experiences were more than unset¬
tling; they raised real questions about the quality of the newly acquired
freedom. What were the blacks to think when "those individuals whom we
all regarded as our friends, and hailed as our deliverers,” broke up their
celebrations, heaped physical and mental abuse on them, shoved them off
sidewalks, cursed them as "niggers” and "mokes,” robbed them of their few
belongings, and ravished their women? It was as if one set of masters had
been replaced by another, and that was precisely how a Norfolk black
woman viewed the change in her status: "I reckon I’m Massa Lincoln’s
slave now.” 58

Reflecting the wide range and diversity of northern opinion, the Union
Army also contained in its ranks men who were imbued with abolitionist
ideals, who were anxious to wage an antislavery war, and who would have
resented any implication that they harbored racist attitudes. "I tell the
boys right to their face I am in the war for the freedom of the slave,” a
Wisconsin soldier boasted. Initially indifferent or hostile to emancipation,
some Union soldiers were won over by military considerations, while oth¬
ers resolved their doubts when they came face to face with the victims of
the "peculiar institution.” After hearing from slave runaways the stories
of their escape and the bondage they had left behind them, a Union soldier
in North Carolina wrote his parents that "every man in our army is now
an abolitionist.” Even more convincing than the familiar tales of whippings
and the separation of families was the direct physical evidence of how
slaves had been treated. Upon visiting several plantations near New Or¬
leans, where he released slave prisoners from heavy chains and weights,
one Union soldier said he had seen "enough of the horrors of slavery to
mnVft one an Abolitionist forever.” When several new black recruits
stripped for a physical examination in Louisiana, prior to their induction,
a. Union soldier afterwards described in detail the m a rk s which bondage
had left on the bodies of these men. It was a depressing sight.

Some of them were scarred from head to foot where they had been
whipped. One man’s back was nearly all one scar, as if the skin had been
chopped up and left to heal in ridges. Another had scars on the back of
his neck, and from that all the way to his heels every little ways; but that
was not such a sight as the one with the great solid mass of ridges from
his shoulders to his hips. That beat all the antislavery sermons ever yet
preached . 57

The more sympathetic Union soldiers tried to alleviate the condition
of the slave refugees who flocked in ever greater numbers to their camps.
Anticipating the movement of teachers and missionaries into the South,
they volunteered their time to establish informal classes for the slaves in
reading and writing, and some insisted on giving them religious instruc¬
tion. The life of an abolitionist in the Union Army, however, much like that
of his counterpart in the North, was never very comfortable, particularly

132

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

if he sought to proselytize his fellow soldiers, and he almost always sensed
that he was in a small minority. "Most of the boys have their laugh at me
for helping the 'Niggers,’ ” a Wisconsin soldier confessed. The hostility
toward abolitionism and blacks that so many Northerners carried with
them into the war was sometimes vented on those who tried to agitate the
subject in the Army. "If some of the niger lovers want to know what the
most of the Solgers think of them,” an Ohioan informed his father, "they
think about as much as they do a reble. They think they are Shit asses.” 58

The abolitionist Yankee found himself troubled by more than the
hostility of his fellow soldiers. Mirroring the ambivalence of the antislav¬
ery movement itself, he often found it easier to preach abolitionism than
to accept the black man as an equal or to mix with him socially. Henry T.
Johns, the well-meaning and sympathetic Massachusetts soldier, frankly
confessed near the end of the war, "I know I always revolt at shaking hands
with a darkey or sitting by him, but it is a prejudice that should shame me.”
To free the slaves, he recognized approvingly, was to grant them equality.
"There is no help for it, and the sooner we get rid of our foolish prejudices
the better for us. In me those prejudices are very strong. I can fight for this
race more easily than I can eat with them.” As they moved through the
South and ultimately became an army of occupation, Union soldiers, like
the North itself, failed to agree on the proper place of black people—both
freed slaves and free blacks—in American society. If there was anything
approaching a typical attitude, a Union Army physician stationed in Vir¬
ginia may have come close to capturing it. He did not regard himself as
proslavery. He wanted to see the institution of slavery abolished. But he
found it difficult to view blacks as people possessing emotions, sensitivities,
and aspirations like everyone else: "He thinks they are nobody and ought
never to be anybody.” 88

The attitudes and behavior of the Union soldiers varied considerably,
ranging from condescension to outright brutality. That made the Yankees
no different in the eyes of many slaves than their own masters and mis¬
tresses. Despite the uncertainties that awaited them, the movement of
slaves toward the Union lines that had begun in the early months of the
war continued unabated, with growing numbers now running away with
Yankee raiding parties, or following Union troops when they passed
through the vicinity, or seeking out the Union gunboats plying the south¬
ern rivers. The exodus reached such proportions in some regions that it
took on all the drama and tragedy of the most classic wartime refugee
scenes. When Sherman’s army moved through Georgia and the Carolinas,
tens of thousands of slaves tried desperately to keep up with the marching
columns, many of them carrying their household goods and children,
fighting off hunger, exhaustion, exposure, harassment, and the efforts of
Union officers to drive them off. “[W]e only wanted the able-bodied men
(and to tell you the truth the youngest and best looking women),” one
officer wrote. "Sometimes we took off whole families and plantations of
niggers, by way of repaying some influential secessionist. But the useless

Kingdom Comin ’

133

part of these we soon manage to lose—sometimes in crossing rivers—
sometimes in other ways.” This letter, allegedly found in the streets of
Camden after the Yankees departed, may have been fabricated by Confed¬
erate propagandists but other evidence suggests little distortion of what
took place on Sherman’s march. Numbers of slaves were left behind on the
roads and at the river crossings, where they subsequently fell prey to
General Wheeler’s Confederate raiders, and some drowned while attempt¬
ing to cross the rivers. "The waters of the Ogeechee and Ebenezer Creek,”
one ofSherman’s officers wrote, "can account for hundreds who were block¬
ing up our columns, and there abandoned.... Many of them died in the
bayous and lagoons of Georgia.” The terrible plight of the Georgia refugees
moved a young Boston teacher to observe that "freedom means death to
many.” 60

Exulting over the mass desertion of slaves to the Union Army, a black
newspaper in New Orleans proclaimed, "History furnishes no such inten¬
sity of determination, on the part of any race, as that exhibited by these
people to be free.” But historical comparisons immediately came to mind,
and abolitionist-minded northern whites and black leaders made the most
of them. This "vast hegira” of slaves, they agreed, resembled the movement
of the Israelites out of Egypt and to the Promised Land. The differences,
however, seemed almost as striking. "There was no plan in this exodus, no
Moses to lead it,” observed a Union officer who had been entrusted with the
supervision of over 20,000 black refugees in the Mississippi Valley. Nor did
it appear to have a Promised Land. By the time they reached the Union
camps, the refugees were exhausted, half starved, frightened, and sick. It
was not uncommon for malnutrition and pulmonary disease to claim the
lives of three or four blacks every day in the hastily constructed and
congested contraband villages. "The poor Negroes die as fast as ever,” a
missionary teacher reported. "The children are all emaciated to the last
degree and have such violent coughs and dysenteries that few survive.” 61

The number of slaves entering the Union lines provoked considerable
dismay among commanding officers who found their camps overrun and
the movement of their troops impeded. "What shall I do with my niggers?”
asked one beleaguered commander, while another complained that he had
more blacks in his camp than whites and no rations to feed them. What to
do with these slaves proved to be a formidable problem that would never
be satisfactorily resolved. The most immediate solution took the form of the
contraband camps in which slaves were put to work as government labor¬
ers, paid wages, fed on army rations, and clothed by philanthropic agencies.
The camps soon became overcrowded, disease took a heavy toll, the prom¬
ised wages were often not paid, and many slaves came to feel they had been
defrauded.

Dey said that we, de able-body men, was to get $8 a month, an de women,

$4 and de ration; only we was to allow $1 de month to help de poor an

de old—which we don’t ’gret—an’ one dollar for de sick ones, an den

134

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

anudder dollar for Gen’l Purposes. We don’t zactly know who dat Gen’l
is, but ’pears like dar was a heap o’ dem Gen’ls, an’ it takes all dar is to
pay ’em, ’cause we don’t get nuffins.

That was only a precursor of the problems that would beset Federal policy
toward the "contrabands.” By the end of the war, with more than a million
ex-slaves under some form of Federal custody, the initial confusion regard¬
ing their status, disposition, and future remained unresolved, thereby frus¬
trating anything approaching a genuine social reconstruction. 8 *

What migh t, have induced so many slaves to leave the relative security
of the farm and plantation for the uncertainty of the Union Army and the
contraband camps deeply troubled some slaveholding fa m i li es. The most
convenient explanation was that the Yankees forcibly removed them, and
there were sufficient examples to warrant such a charge; some slaves, on
the other hand, were thrown off the plantations by their owners, particu¬
larly the women and children of men who had run off or had enlisted in
the Union Army. After the way the Yankees had stripped the plantations
bare, some masters also pleaded poverty, claiming they simply could not
feed or support the blacks. Recognizing this, numerous slaves had already
left, deciding they might fare better on army rations. But most whites
suspected that the prospect of immediate freedom, and the fear of losing
it if they remained, induced many of their slaves to follow the Yankees.
"Generally when told to run away from the soldiers, they go right to them,”
TCntA Stone observed in Louisiana, "and I cannot say I blame them.” More
ominously, a Louisiana planter, after watching the slaves in his neighbor¬
hood for a week, thought many of them decided to leave with the Yankees
because they feared retaliation for the outrages they had committed and
they had heard that "the 'rebel’ soldiers were coming on down and killing
negroes as they came.” That may also help to explain why some slaves
balked at Yankee questions about the names of their owners. 63

The decision to desert their "home,” locale, and "white folks,” how¬
ever, did not always come easily. Every slave would have to determine his
own priorities. Near Milledgeville, Georgia, in the path of Sherman’s
march, a staff officer came upon a scene that could have been enacted
almost anywhere the Union soldiers appeared. In a hut he found a slave
couple, both of them more than sixty years old. Nothing they said to him
suggested that they were displeased with their situation; if anything, like
many of the elderly slaves he had encountered, they were content to spend
their remaining years in the service and care of those who had exploited
them for a lifetime of labor. But as the troops prepared to move on, the
woman suddenly stood up, and a "fierce, almost devilish” look came across
a face that only minutes before had been almost devoid of expression.
"What for you sit dar?” she asked, pointing her finger at the old man
crouched in the comer of the fireplace. "You s’pose I wait sixty years for
nutten? Don’t yer see de door open? I’se follow my child; I not stay. Yes.
anudder day I goes Tong wid dese people; yes, sar, I walks till I drop in mj

Kingdom Cornin'

135

tracks.” Only a Rembrandt, the officer later wrote, could have done justice
to this scene. "A more terrible sight I never beheld.” 64

If the Civil War initially drew some masters and slaves closer together,
with both now sharing privations and suffering, the approach of the Union
Ar m y underscored the ambiguous nature of that relationship and forced
the master to reevaluate not only individual slaves in whom he had placed
his confidence but the entire system of racial subordination. Both sides in
the war had an obvious stake in how the slaves responded to the Yankees.
The faithful black reinforced the conviction that the great mass of slaves
(there had always been some "bad niggers”) were perfectly content and had
no real wish to alter their status; the fidelity and steadiness demonstrated
by the slaves, a North Carolinian argued, "speaks not only well for them¬
selves but well for their training and the system under which they lived.”
Union propagandists and abolitionists, on the other hand, viewed the ex¬
odus of slaves to and with the Union Army as an oppressed and brutalized
population welcoming its release from bondage. In that spirit, a Union
reporter wrote of a recent victory:

The moment our forces defeated the enemy at Labadieville, hundreds of
negroes, besotted by the most severe system of Slavery, were in a moment
left to themselves, and in a delirium of excitement, they first threw
themselves in an ecstacy of joy, on their knees, and "bressed God that
Massa Linkum had come,” and then, as semi-civilized people would natu¬
rally do, they commenced indulging in all sorts of excesses, the first fruits
of their unrestricted liberty . 85

That captured the public mood in the North perfectly, indicting the enemy
(slaveholders) while at the same time explaining black excesses in ways
that reinforced prevailing racial beliefs and suggested the need for some
form of continued racial control.

Caught between these polar positions were the slaves , themselves,
many of whom were sufficiently familiar with the expectations of white
people to frame an appropriate response.

The experience of Wilmer Shields, who managed several plantations in
Louisiana in the absence of the owner, suggests only the magnitude of the
problem that thousands of masters and overseers had to confront when
Union soldiers passed ‘through the vicinity. "You can form no idea of my
situation and the anxiety of my mind,” he informed his employer on De¬
cember 11,1863. "All is anarchy and confusion here—everything going to
destruction—and the negroes on the plantation insubordinate My life has
been several times in danger.” Several weeks later, Shields confessed that

136

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

he felt powerless to deal with "the outrageous conduct of the Negroes who
will not work for love or money—but who steal every thing they can lay
their hands on.” Although he offered to pay them for their labor, those who
continued to work did so at their own pace; they reported to the fields in
the late morning, picked a little cotton, and then returned to the quarters
to cook the hogs and beef they had killed that day. "You have no idea of
the mental agony I endure under this state of affairs,” Shields repeated, in
still another dismal report to the absentee owner. "Neither life, liberty, or
property is valued a pin here—bands of thieves stroll about the country
plundering in every direction—and I have not been allowed a single
weapon for self defense—I know not at what moment my tim* may come.”

When the local Union commander backed Shields’s authority "to
make the people work,” conditions improved perceptibly, but the officer’s
departure prompted a return to the earlier manifestations of disaffection.
Let me again repeat, Shields advised the owner, "that but very very few
are faithful—Some of those who remain are worse than those who have
gone—And I think that all who are able will leave as soon as the warm
weather sets in in no other way can I account for their present course of
conduct for they will not even gather food for themselves.” Like the field
hands, most of the house servants left when they pleased and did little
when they remained. "I do not miss her,” Shields said of a departed ser¬
vant, "for she had long since ceased to attend to her duties here.... When
all leave me, if they do, I will be compelled to hire one or two, and they if
possible shall be White servants.”

After the war, a disillusioned Shields compiled for his employer a list
of the ex-slaves who remained on the plantations, and he affixed next to
each name a mark denoting his evaluation of their wartime conduct and
dependability. Of the 146 adult slaves on four plantations, 16 had been
"perfectly faithful,” 30 had "done well comparatively, ” and the other 100
had behaved badly; many of them Outrageously. ” Nearly every slave on
this list, Shields noted, had absented h i m self from the plantation at some
time and then returned, "some of them half a dozen times.” So grateful was
he to those few who had remained "perfectly faithful” that he now urged
his employer to present medals to four of them, with some "appropriate”
inscription testifying to their loyalty. "The Medals coming from me,” he
explained, "would be but little valued, from you greatly.” More than eigh¬
teen months after the war, Shields remained obsessed with how the slaves
had behaved during that crisis, and he was perfectly willing to use it as a
standard by which to judge the blacks under his supervision. When his
employer instructed him to give five dollars to one of the freedmen, Shields
retorted: "Kobin was always one of my favorites, and I have ever thought
him honest, but it is a question whether he was faithful to you or me—True
he did not betray or rob us, as a great many others did, but he deserted
us m two or three weeks after the Federal occupation of Natchez—for gain
—instead of remaining here, as Ellen and Frank, and two or three others
did, assisting me in protecting and saving the place and property.... This
was fidelity.” 68

Kingdom Cornin'

137

What transpired on the plantations managed by Wilmer Shields would
be repeated on countless places lying in the path of the Union Army. Far
more than any Federal proclamation, the slaves themselves undermined
the authority of the planter class. In Mississippi and Louisiana, for exam¬
ple, the many reports of slave "demoralization” and "defection” came close
to suggesting a coordinated withdrawal of labor and efficiency. When a
large Union force passed through the Bayou Lafourche region in late 1862,
A. Franklin Pugh, the part owner and manager of four sugar plantations,
first noted "great excitement” among the slaves; the next day, he found
them "in a very bad way”; two days later, they were "completely demoral¬
ized,” some of them leaving and more preparing to depart. "I fear we shall
lose them all. They go off in carts.” Before the week had ended, one of his
plantations had been virtually "cleaned out,” with many of the slaves
fleeing at night, and conditions steadily deteriorated at the other places. In
what Pugh perceived as "a rebellion,” the slaves on a neighboring planta¬
tion overpowered their master and overseer, tied them up, and tried to
remove them to a nearby town. Elsewhere in the rich plantation parishes,
slaves refused to work without pay (or for worthless Confederate currency)
and were generally found to be "demoralized,” "refractory,” and "in a state
of mutiny”—that is, if they remained at all. "The negroes have all left their
owners in this parish,” a planter’s son reported from Bayou Plaquemine.
"Some planters have not even one servant left. Our wives and daughters
have to take the pot and tubs; the men, where there are any, take to the
fields with the plough and hoe.” 67

When Union forces in 1863 undertook an expedition into central and
northern Louisiana, the news of their approach reportedly "turned the
negroes crazy.” Not only did the slaves refuse to work, John H. Ransdell
informed an absentee owner, but "they became utterly demoralized at once
and everything like subordination and restraint was at an end.” The slaves
who did not flee with the Yankees, he observed, "remained at home to do
much worse. ” For nearly a week, Ransdell, like other planter families in
Rapides Parish, had to stand by helplessly (usually secluded in their homes)
while the blacks engaged in "a perfect jubilee.” Some planters lost nearly
every movable thing,” as the slaves destroyed property, killed much of the
livestock, and emptied the storerooms. "Confound them,” Ransdell wrote
the governor of Louisiana, who owned the neighboring plantation, "they
deserve to be half starved and to be worked nearly to death for the way they
have acted.... The recent trying scenes through which we have passed
have convinced me that no dependence is to be placed on the negro —and
that they are the greatest hypocrites and liars that God ever made.” After
enumerating his "considerable” losses, however, he thought them " nothing
in comparison to those of the planters below us —and we really have great
cause of thankfulness that we came off so well.” 08

The heavy concentrations of slaves in parts of Louisiana and Missis¬
sippi help to account for the extent of the "demoralization”—that popular
term used by whites to describe the disaffection of enslaved black workers.
Even some ardent defenders of the "peculiar institution” might have

138

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

agreed that slavery worked its greatest excesses in these regions and
the most impossible demands on black laborers. Not surprisingly, than, the
brutalizing nature of the labor system in the Deep South supposedly maria
for a more volatile situation than elsewhere, and slaveholders were now
reaping the consequences of years of abuse. Perhaps, too, the recalcitrant
slaves who had been sold here from the more "benign” slaveholding states
provided leadership or in some way influenced those who had known no
other kind of bondage.

The problem with such explanations is that the excesses of bondage in
the Deep South might have conceivably yielded some different results. As
a number of fugitive slaves argued, the labor system in the Louisiana sugar
parishes was calculated to produce the most docile, abject, obsequious, and
degraded bondsmen, totally lacking in hope. If any system might have been
expected to produce a crop of model Sambos, it should have been this one.
But the reaction of these slaves at the approach of the Union Army, and
the testimony of Louisiana and Mississippi planters, suggest that a people
apparently broken in body and spirit had even more reason to contemplate
the benefits of freedom and to hasten their liberation.

Every plantation, every farm, every town no doubt had its own version
of how the slaves behaved. Until the Union Army made its presence felt,
plantation life tended to remain relatively stable, crops were and

most slaves went about their daily tasks. The Emancipation Proclamation
by itself did little to alter this situation, with most slaves preferring to wait
for a more propitious moment. But news that Yankee soldiers were some¬
where within reach precipitated the rapid depopulation of the slave quar¬
ters, often without the slightest warning. "They have shown no gignn of
insubordination,” one observer noted. "Down to the last moment they cut
their maize and eat their corn-cake with their old docility—then they
suddenly disappear.” The experience of John H. Bills, the Tennessee
planter, resembled that of his Mississippi neighbors and illustrated a pat¬
tern of slave response that crippled the labor system in substantial portions
of the occupied South. With the appearance of the Yankees, the restless¬
ness and reluctance to work he had observed during the past several
months suddenly flared into "wild confusion” and "a general stampede.”
In less than six weeks, more than twenty slaves left him (he estimated his
loss at nearly $22,000), and those who remained might as well have gone,
"they being totally demoralized & ungovernable.” Like the field hands, the
servants worked erratically if at all: "the females have quit entirely or
nearly so, four of the men come & go when & where they please.... I talk
to them Earnestly but fear it will do no good.” Some six months later, "a
wretched state of idleness” prevailed, and Bills found himself unable to
exert any control. After still another six months, he conceded that slavery
on his plantations was "about played out.” 89

The epidemic of "demoralization” and "desertion” varied little from
state to state (except for those regions untouched by the Union Army), nor
did it make any perceptible distinctions between reputedly "cruel” and

Kingdom Cornin' 1*9

"benign” masters. When the Yankees approached her Georgia residence,
Mary Jones might have wondered whether the many years of solicitude
and concern with which the fa mil y had treated the slaves would now be
sufficient to meet the test. Before his death in 1863, her husband the
Reverend C. C. Jones—had devoted much of his life to the spiritual uplift
of the slaves. Upon the arrival of the troops, however, the slaves belonging
to Mary Jones, and those in the immediate vicinity, exhibited a range of
behavior that left her bewildered, hurt, and angry. "The people are all idle
on the plantations, most of them seeking their own pleasure. Although
relatively few of her slaves had yet defected, Mary Jones was sufficiently
dismayed by the behavior of some of those who remained to wonder if she
would not be better off if they left. "Their condition is one of perfect
anarchy and rebellion. They have placed themselves in perfect antagonism
to their owners and to all government and control. We dare not predict the
end of all this, if the Lord in mercy does not restrain the hearts and wills
of this deluded people. They are certainly prepared for any measures.” 70

After only a brief flirtation with "freedom,” some slaves drifted back
to the plantations and farms from which they had fled. On a number of
places, nearly every slave left at some point during the war, not necessarily
together, but most of them returned within several weeks or months. "Fa¬
ther had eighty five negroes gone for a while,” the son of a Louisiana
planter reported, "but about twenty have returned since.” Nor was it
uncommon for slaves to return only to leave again. Homesickness, the
families they had left behind, and disillusionment with the empty content
of their freedom, compounded still further by near starvation and exhaus-
tion, drove many back to the relative security of the plantation. The Yan¬
kees "didn’t show no respec’ for his feeling,” a Georgia slave explained, and
he voiced the discouragement of many who had sought refuge in the Fed-
eral camps only to be subjected to hard work and personal abuse.

Once having left the plantation and tasted even a semblance of free¬
dom, the blacks who returned often behaved in a way that caused their
owners considerable anxiety. On a Louisiana plantation, Mary C. R. Hardi¬
son complained that the servants heaped abusive language on her and did
everything but strike her; the "leader” was thought to be a young black
who had recently returned to the plantation declaring he had had enough
of the Yankees. John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, came to regret his
decision to re-admit "My Woman Emmeline” after her brief stay m a Fed¬
eral camp where her husband had died. Upon her return, the woman acted
"verry Contrary,” refused to obey his commands, and threatened to jump
off the Waggon” if he tried to return her to the Yankees. "I feel that my
desire to oblige has gotten me into trouble,” Bills concluded from this

BEEN IN THE STOHM SO LONG

140

experience. Perceiving the changed demeanor of the returnees, or unwill¬
ing to forgive them for having once deserted, some masters simply refused
to permit them back on the plantation or else kept them under constant
scrutiny. "Jane returned to Arcadia,” a Georgia woman noted, "but as she
has been to Savannah and returned before, I fear she may have come to
steal.” Even more galling for masters were slaves like James Woodson, who
returned to Fluvanna County, Virginia, with a detachment of Union
troops, led them to the place where the valuables had been hidden, and
then stood by while the Yankees whipped his ex-owner. That display of
"insolence” was exceeded only by the former slaves who returned to the old
plantation not with but as Union soldiers . 72

After what many planters had experienced, the number of slave defec¬
tions seemed less important than the behavior of those who remained.
More often them most whites wished to believe or to concede publicly, t h e
"demoralization” (as they preferred to call it) of the slave population took
a violent and destructive bent. The victims of such depredations took little
comfort in the ready explanation that these were exceptional cases. Nor
was their anguish necessarily mitigated by the popular view that only the
Yankees could have instigated the blacks to behave so outrageously. If only
the slaves had been left alone, Henry W. Ravenel kept telling himself, they
would have obeyed their natural instincts and remained "a quiet, con¬
tented, & happy people.” But Ravenel, a native of South Carolina, should
have known better. The sacking of nearby Beaufort, early in the war,
illustrated the capacity of the slaves for destructive activity in the days
preceding the arrival of Union troops. (Local planters had already set an
example by trying to bum down the cotton bams before their hasty depar-
ture.) If slaves in the Sea Islands region usually refrained from destroying
the plantations on which they lived, the many who poured into Beaufort
had little compunction about occupying and ransacking the stately town
houses of well-to-do planters. When one planter momentarily returned to
his home, he found a slave seated at the piano "playing away like the very
Devil” and two young black women upstairs "dancing away famously”; he
also discovered that many neighboring houses had been "completely
turned upside down and inside out” and the local churches had been van¬
dalized. When a Union landing party finally came ashore, they were star¬
tled by the extent of the devastation.

We went through spacious houses where only a week ago families were
living in luxury, and saw their costly furniture despoiled; books and
papers smashed; pianos on the sidewalk, feather beds ripped open, and
even the filth of the Negroes left lying in parlors and bedchambers.

Much of the destruction, one reporter suggested, could not be defined as
"plunder” but only as a "malicious love of mischief gratified.” When news
of the sacking reached the North, Henry M. Turner, an outspoken black
clergyman, was equally startled; in fact, he refused to believe the "ridicu-

Kingdom Cornin’ 141

lous, outrageous, and cannibalistic reports” of slave excesses. Having been
a resident of South Carolina for more than twenty years of his life, he could
attest to the fact that "there are no class of colored people south of Mason
and Dixon’s line, where more sound sense, morality, religion, and refined
taste, prevails, than in Beaufort.” The slaves themselves said little about
the fury they had unleashed on some of the more imposing symbols of the
slaveholding aristocracy. Nor did they apparently deem an explanation

necessary . 73 , „ ,

Although the extent of slave "pillaging” m the South was sometimes
exaggerated, or confused with Yankee depredations, that any should have
occurred aroused consternation. "The Moorfield negroes are crazy quite,
a South Carolinian wrote; "they have been to Pinopolis, helping in the
ggplrir. gr 0 f the houses.” In some areas, the slaves singled out the popular
summer retreats for wealthy planters, where the quality of the furnishings
provided sufficient temptation. Where white families had abandoned their
homes, the slaves in many instances preferred occupation to pillage, mov¬
ing from their own cramped quarters into the more commodious and com¬
fortable lodgings which they had previously envied from a distance; the
slaves who flocked into the towns from the outlying plantations, seeking
the protection of Federal authority and a more congenial atmosphere in
which to spend their first days of freedom, found an instant answer to their
housing problem by occupying the elegant town houses of absent owners.
To sleep in the master’s bed and eat at the dining-room table with the
family silver and china was a novel and exhilarating experience. "Mam¬
ma’s house is occupied by freedmen, cooking in every room,” reported a
South Carolina woman who had only recently heard from a friend in a
nearby town that "all the houses around them are occupied by negroes.
Already in shock over the apparent collapse of the social order, native
whites now listened to reports that slaves were using the baronial town
houses to give "Negro balls” and dinner parties. "The whites [presumably
Yankees] and blacks danced together,” a friend wrote Adele Allston of a
recent "ball” in Georgetown, South Carolina . 74

Where would it all end? The events of the past several weeks, Henry
W. Ravenel confided to his diary, reminded him of the horrors of the
French Revolution. "White man is nigger—and nigger is white man” was
the way another South Carolinian chose to describe "the state of things.
Whether in the towns or in the countryside, the welcome accorded the
Union troops by many slaves had not been confined to prayers and singing
but had included as well the expropriation of nearly everything belonging
to their masters and mistresses that could be moved. With a feeling of utter
helplessness, Amanda Stone’s family, after abandoning the family home in
Louisiana, heard how the slaves had quarreled over the division of clothes
and how the house had been stripped of furniture, carpets, books, the piano,
"and everything else.” Nor did the presence of the white family necessarily
restrain the slaves. "The Negroes as soon as they heard the guns,” a nee
planter in South Carolina reported, "rushed to my house and pillaged it ot

142

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

many things and principally wearing apparel”; he felt certain that the
entire affair had been "pre-arranged .” 75

For the masters, what proved most difficult to accept was the gratifica¬
tion some slaves derived from these attacks on property. "Many of them,”
John H. Bills thought, "do all they can to have us destroyed & delight in
seeing the work of destruction.” Upon returning to their plantation home,
the Allston family suddenly understood the overseer’s report that their
slaves had "behaved Verry badly.”

We looked at the house; it was a wreck,—the front steps gone, not a door
nor shutter left, and not a sash. They had torn out all the mahogany
framework around the doors and windows—there were mahogany panels
below the windows and above the doors there were panels painted—the
mahogany banisters to the staircase going upstairs; everything that

could be tom away was gone_It was a scene of destruction, and papa’s

study, where he kept all his accounts and papers, as he had done from
the time he began planting as a young man, was almost waistdeep in tom
letters and papers . 76

The systematic nature of much of the black pillaging suggests that it
was frequently neither indiscriminate nor simply a matter of gratified
revenge but rather an opportunity to supplement their meager diets and
wardrobes and improve their standard of living. Why they killed the live¬
stock, emptied the meat houses and storerooms, and expropriated the li¬
quors and wines would seem sufficiently obvious. The furniture and
materials removed from the Big House were often used to make their own
rah ins more habitable. One South Carolina slave explained that after the
master departed, they stripped boards from his house in order to floor their
own cabins and put in lofts. Similarly, when the slaves broke into closets,
bureaus, trunks, and desks, ripped open the bedding, or scattered the mas¬
ter’s private papers, they were frequently seeking money, jewelry, or silver¬
ware that might be traded for needed commodities. When the slaves seized
the mules, horses, and wagons, it was often with the idea of making their
escape from the plantation, taking with them whatever the carts could
carry. On A. F. Pugh’s plantation, an enterprising former slave accumu¬
lated a cartload of articles from several neighboring plantations and bar¬
tered them with other blacks in the vicinity; the overseer was powerless to
stop this apparently flourishing business based on loot . 77

What the whites defined as theft might be viewed by the slaves as
long-overdue payments for past services. Adele Allston conceded almost as
much when she wrote her son about the destruction visited upon their
Chicora Wood plantation. "The conduct of the negroes in robbing our
house, store room meat house etc and refusing to restore anything shows
you they think it right to steal from us, to spoil us, as the Israelites did the
Egyptians.” The slaves simply suggested that the question of theft be
placed in its proper perspective, like the old Gullah preacher who asked his

Kingdom Cornin'

143

congregation, "Ef buckra neber tief, how come nigger yer?” That the con¬
straints of slave life had made "thieves” of them some slaves readily con¬
ceded, though always stressing the conditions that had made this
necessary. "We work so hard and get nothing for our labor but jes our
lowance, we ’bleege to steal,” a South Carolina slave explained in 1863,
"and den we must keep from dem ebery ting or dey suffer us too much. But
dey take all our labor, and steal our chiFren, and we only take dare
chicken.” To attempt to reason with a slave on this sensitive matter could
be an exasperating, if sometimes illuminating experience for a white. In
Tennessee, a slave rode into a Union camp on a horse he had taken from
his owner. Upon being questioned, presumably by a Union soldier or re¬
porter, the slave insisted only that the usual notions of morality had little
relevance to his action.

"Don’t you think you did very wrong, Dick, to take your mistress’
horse?”

"Well, I do’ know, sah; I didn’t take the bes’ one. She had three; two
of ’em fuss-rate hosses, but the one I took is ole, an’ not berry fast, an’

I offe’d to sell him fo’ eight dolla’s, sah.”

"But, Dick, you took at least a thousand dollars from your mistress,
besides the horse.”

"How, sah?”

"Why, you were worth a thousand dollars, and you should have been
satisfied with that much, without taking the poor woman’s horse,” said
I, gravely.

The contraband scratched his woolly head, rolled up his eyes at me,
and replied with emphasis.

T don't look at itjis dat way, massa. I wo’ked ha’d fo’ missus mor’n
thirty yea’s, an’ I reckon in dat time I ’bout pay fo’ meself. An’ dis yea’
missus guv me leave to raise a patch o* ’baccy fo’ my own. Well, I wo’ked
nights, an’ Sabbaths, an’ spar’ times, an’ raised a big patch (way prices
is, wuff two hun’red dolla’s, I reckon) o’ ’baccy; an’ when I got it tooken
car’ of dis fall, ole missus took it ’way from me; give some to de neighbors;
keep some fo’ he’ own use; an’ sell some, an’ keep de money, an’ I reckon
dat pay fo’ de ole hoss!”

Failing to find any conscience in the darkey, I gave up the argu¬
ment . 78

Even where slaves refrained from expropriating and destroying prop¬
erty, they often behaved in ways that troubled and infuriated their masters
and mistresses. The decision of a slave to remain on the plantation was no
guarantee of his fidelity or steady labor. The Reverend Samuel A. Agnew,
a Mississippi slaveholder, understood that all too well. "Some of our
negroes will not go to the Yankees,” he thought, "but they may all prove
faithless.” For many slave owners, as for Agnew, the ability to retain the
bulk of their blacks proved to be no cause for self-congratulation. Despite
the concern voiced over the "stampede” of the slaves, some white families

144

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

might have found reasons to be grateful, if only because they avoided the
anguish experienced by so many of their neighbors.

Oh! deliver me from the "citizens of African descent.” I am disgusted
forever with the whole race. I have not faith in one single dark individual.

They are all alike ungrateful and treacherous—every servant is a spy
upon us, & everything we do or say is reported to the Yankees. They know
everything . 79

The terms with which slave-owning families described the conduct of
their blacks—"insolence,” "impertinence,” "impudence,” and "ingrati¬
tude”—had been used often and indiscriminately to denote slave transgres¬
sions or departures from expected behavior. Once the Yankees arrived,
masters and mistresses detected examples of such behavior almost every¬
where—in the defection of the favorites, in the demeanor and language of
the slaves who remained, in their refusal to submit to punishment, in their
failure to obey orders promptly (or at all), and, most frequently, in their
unwillingness to work "as usual.” To a Louisiana planter, traveling from
Ascension Parish to New Orleans in mid-1863, the slaves he observed along
the way were nearly all "insolent & idle,” which he defined as "working
not more than half a day, yet demanding full rations of every thing.” To
the wife of a prominent Alabama planter, the slaves behaved in "an inso¬
lent manner” by t aking off whenever there was work to be done. "The
negroes are worse than free,” she informed her son. "They say they are
free. We cannot exert any authority. I beg ours to do what little is to be
done.” To a Virginia white woman, the blacks were acting "very independ¬
ent and impudent,” and like most whites she equated the two traits. To
slave owners everywhere, the defections were difficult enough to under¬
stand but the ways in which some slaves chose to depart invariably pro¬
voked the most grievous charge of all—"ingratitude.” Few stated it more
succinctly than Emily C. Douglas, a resident of Natchez who had earlier
extolled the loyalty of her slaves: "They left without even a good-bye.” 80

The "delirium of excitement” set off by the arrival of the Yankees gave
scores of slaves a much-welcomed respite from their usual labors and
momentarily paralyzed agricultural operations. That was the day, a former
Florida slave remembered, when they dropped their plows and hoes,
rushed to their cabins, put on their best clothes, and went into town to join
with other slaves in a "joyous and un-forgettable occasion.” If the slaves
did not stop work altogether, they often slowed down the pace and made
only sporadic appearances in the fields, "going, coming, and working when
they please and as they please,” sometimes spending the day in their
cabins, sometimes venturing into town for a week at a time. The attempts

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to make a crop under these conditions were futile. On the Magnolia planta¬
tion in Louisiana, the overseer first complained that the slaves were 'Very
slow getting out”; three weeks later, "the ring of the Bell no longer a
delightful sound,” and the slaves were "moving very slowly”; more than a
month later, in utter exasperation, he could only "wish every negro would
leave the place as they will do only what pleases them, go out in the
morning when it suits them, come in when they please, etc.” The erratic
performance of the slaves even dismayed some northern observers, who
wondered if this augured trouble for a free labor system. The Negroes’ idea
of freedom, an alarmed Union reporter observed, "is that of unrestrained
license to do as they please, and go where they choose.” The slaves might
well have agreed, after having watched their masters and other whites for
so many years interpret freedom in precisely that manner. 81

To mark their release from bondage, blacks not only withheld their
labor but in some instances vented their frustrations and bitterness on the
most glaring and accessible symbols of their past labor—the Big House,
which they might pillage; the cotton gin, which they might deliberately
destroy; the slave pens and cotton houses, which in some cases were con¬
verted into freedmen schools and churches; and the overseer, who often
represented the sole authority left on a plantation and who had come to
personify the excesses of bondage. Many overseers clearly deserved their
reputation for cruelty; nevertheless, the discipline they enforced, the pun¬
ishments they meted out, and the labor they exacted from the slaves almost
always reflected their need to meet the expectations of their employers.
Rather than share the responsibility for any excesses that might result
from his often inordinate demands, the planter all too readily permitted his
overseer to assume the blame; indeed, the owner might even intercede at
times to soften the overseer’s punishments, thereby enhancing his own
sense of paternalism and "humanity” while reinforcing the image of the
overseer as an uncaring brute. 82

Neither the slaves nor the overseers were necessarily oblivious to this
kind of deception, but the flight of the masters often left the overseer by
himself to absorb the slaves’ wrath. Regardless of what whites remained
on the plantation, the coming of the Yankees encouraged slaves to act as
though there were alternatives in their lives: if they chose not to desert,
they might simply refuse to submit to the usual discipline and punish¬
ments. On the C. C. Clay plantation in Alabama, the slaves had become "so
bold,” the mistress informed her son, that they threatened to kill the
overseer if he tried to punish them for disobedience. That these were not
empty threats is borne out by what took place on the Millaudon plantation
in Louisiana, where "bad feelings” between the overseer and the slaves had
prompted the absentee owner to pay a visit to his place. When Millaudon
tried to reprimand the "ringleader,” the slave responded "with insolence.”
Unaccustomed to such conduct, the planter then struck him with a whip.
This time the slave responded by furiously charging Millaudon, who finally
felled him with a stick. "This seemed to bring the negro to his senses, and

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

he took refuge in his cabin; but he presently came out with a hatchet..
One of the other slaves interceded at this point and grabbed the hatchet,
the rebellious slave fled into the cane field, and Millaudon departed from
the plantation, thinking he had suppressed "the affair.” He had not gone
far, however, before the report reached him that his slaves were now "in
full revolt” and had killed the overseer. Returning once again to the planta¬
tion, this time with Union soldiers, Millaudon beheld an extraordinary
scene: a large number of his blacks, with their possessions and quantities
of plantation goods, were walking alongside a cart on which lay the body
of the murdered overseer, wrapped in a flag. "It appears that he had been
attacked by five of them while he was at dinner, his head being split open
by blows with a hatchet, and penetrated by shots at his face.” The "assas¬
sins” reportedly "rejoiced” over their success, and "the whole gang” of
some 150 slaves had left the plantation. 83

Anticipating acts of vengeance, some overseers fled shortly before the
Yankees reached their plantations. Those who remained were apt to find
themselves in an uncertain and often perilous situation. If the slaves did
not drive the overseer forcibly off the plantation, they conducted them¬
selves in ways that undermined his authority and left him powerless. On
the Nightingale Hall plantation, one of several rice plantations in South
Carolina owned by Adele Allston, the slaves imprisoned the overseer in his
own house. "Mr. Sweat, was a very good, quiet man, and had been liked by
all the negroes,” Adele Allston’s daughter wrote of him, "but in the intoxi¬
cation of freedom their first exercise of it was to tell Mr. Sweat if he left
the house they would kill him , and they put a negro armed with a shotgun
to guard the house and see that he did not leave alive.” Watching from his
window, the conscientious overseer kept a journal of the activities of the
blacks, hoping someday to hold them to account. 84

Conditions were no different on the Allstons’ Chicora Wood plantation,
where Jesse Belflowers, reputedly one of the most efficient overseers in the
South Carolina low country, had been in charge since 1842. Having been
compelled to surrender the bam keys to the slaves, he confessed to his
employer that the workers had become unmanageable. "I am not allowed
to say any [thing] a bout Work and have not been to the Barn for the last
five days. Jacob is the worst man on the Place, then comes in Scipio Jackey
Sawney & Paul.” And in a "P.S.” he added: "Most all of them have arms.”
Although Adele Allston continued to support him, she wondered in the
aftermath of the war if Belflowers had not outlived his usefulness to the
plantation now that the blacks considered themselves to be free. "Belflow¬
ers is cowed by the violence of the negroes against him,” she wrote to her
son, "and is afraid to speak openly. He is trying to curry favour. His own
morals are impaired by the revolution, and he always required backing as
your father expressed it. You must tell him what to do and support him
in carrying it out.” This proved to be an accurate assessment. Belflowers
never really recovered from his wartime experience and he found it impos¬
sible to adapt himself to the post-emancipation changes. " [I]t Looks Verry

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hard to Pull ones hat to a Negro,” he conceded in April 1865. Within a year,
he was dead—by natural causes. "'He is one of our true friends,” Adele
Allston wrote when she learned he was seriously ill, "and a link connecting
us with the past.” 85

Not surprisingly, the war and emancipation played upon and exacer¬
bated white fears and fantasies that were as old as slavery itself. Despite
the apprehensions they voiced, far fewer masters and mistresses were
murdered and assaulted than expected to be. While hiding from the Yan¬
kees, Joseph LeConte encountered a fellow South Carolinian who lived
from day to day in a state of terror, convinced that a neighbor’s slave he
had once flogged would now murder him. "We tried to reason with him and
show him the absurdity of his fears,” LeConte recalled, "but all in vain. He
looked upon himself as a 'doomed man.’ ” Although the planter escaped the
anticipated vengeance, the fears he had felt were neither unique nor
groundless. Always eager for news from her beloved Charleston, Emma
Holmes recoiled at the reported murder of "my old friend” William Allen,
"who was chopped to pieces in his barn.” Still other reports and rumors of
murder and assault dominated the conversations of whites, including the
ominous story of a planter who "narrowly escaped being murdered by two
of his most trusty negroes.” In a South Carolina community, the Union
commander reported that whites were imploring him for protection from
the blacks, "who were arming themselves and threatening the lives of their
masters,” and one slaveholder had requested protective custody "to save
his life.” In nearly all instances of slave violence against their owners,
whites tended to blame the Yankees, as did Emma Holmes, for having
aroused "the foulest demoniac passions of the negro, hitherto so peaceful
and happy.” At least, such explanations preserved whites from what would
have otherwise been a most excruciating self-examination. 86

Rather than murder their masters, some slaves preferred to expose
them to the humiliations they had once meted out so freely. In Choctaw
County, Mississippi, slaves administered several hundred lashes to Nat
Best, a local planter; in nearby Madison County, two slaves, one of them
disguised as a Union soldier, were reported to have "mercillesly whipped”
an elderly white woman; and in Virginia, near Jamestown, the former
slaves of a reputedly cruel master whipped him some twenty times to
remind him of past punishments. When the Yankees arrived, a former
Virginia slave recalled, the mistress on a neighboring plantation was whip¬
ping a housegirl. "The soldiers made the house girl strip the mistress, whip
her, then dress in her clothes. She left with the soldiers.” Young Sarah
Morgan reacted with horror rather than skepticism to the reports from
Baton Rouge, her home town, that blacks were stopping ladies on the
street, cutting the necklaces from their necks, stripping the rings from
their fingers, and subsequently bragging of these feats. 87

That these proved to be exceptional and isolated examples made them
no less sensational and ominous. Although most slave owners did not meet
personal violence at the hands of their slaves, the persistent reports and

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

rumors of murder, insubordination, insolence, and plunder sustained the
threat and the genuine fear that black freedom might degenerate into
insurrectionary violence. "We are afraid now to walk outside of the gate,”
a South Carolina woman confessed, after hearing that field hands in the
immediate vicinity were "in a dreadful state.” To listen to jubilant slaves
welcome the Yankees by singing (to the tune of a Methodist hymn) "We’ll
hang Jeff Davis on the sour apple tree” may have been more of an irritation
than an overt threat, but on the Magnolia plantation in Lo uisiana the
slaves erected a gallows intended for their master. To achieve their free¬
dom, the slaves on this plantation had come to believe, according to their
master, that they must first hang him and expel the overseer. "[N]o one
now can tell what a Day may bring Forth,” the threatened master wrote,
"we are all in a State of Great uneasiness.” The gallows was never used,
but that became less important than the vivid impression the sight maHo
on the local populace, both whites and blacks. 88

The activities of armed groups of slaves operating out of outlaw settle¬
ments helped to sustain the fears of insurrection. In some areas they con¬
cealed themselves in the swamps, cane brakes, and woods, periodically
raiding nearby plantations and farms for provisions. Where planters had
abandoned their homes, the slaves belonging to these and adjo ining planta¬
tions would sometimes congregate to test their newly won freedom and to
organize themselves into bands of marauders that roamed the countryside,
se izing plantations and parceling out the land and terrorizing the white
populace. Even after Union occupation, the threat posed by these outlaw
gangs and communities persisted. Early in September 1865, a low-country
planter in South Carolina informed the absentee owner of a neighboring
plantation that it was "being rapidly filled up by vagabond negroes from
all parts of the country who go there when they please and are fast destroy¬
ing what you left of a settlement. They are thus become a perfect nuisance
to the neighborhood and harbor for all the thieves and scamps who wont
work.” 89

The point at which "insubordination” or "insolence” became "insur¬
rection” was always somewhat obscure. Perhaps no real distinction existed
in the white man’s mind, except for the number of blacks involved. When
the slaves on the David Pugh plantation in Lo uisiana took their master and
overseer prisoners, that was called "a rebellion.” When slaves on the
nearby Woodland sugar estate refused to work without pay, that was
termed "a state of mumty [sic].” When a large group of slaves in low-
country South Carolina indulged themselves in the wines and liquors ob¬
tained from the homes of former masters, they were perceived as lay ing the
groundwork for "open insurrection at any time.” And when a group of
Louisiana slaves, "armed with clubs and cane knives,” poured into New
Orleans, a frightened white citizen wrote in his diary of "servile war” in
parts of the city. 90

If anything was calculated to revive the specter of black rebellion, it
had to be the knowledge that substa n tial numbers of slaves now had access

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149

to weapons or were already in possession of them. "Molly tells me all of the
men on our plantation have Enfield rifles,” Mary Chesnut noted bitterly,
and perhaps now the enemy will get that "long hoped for rising against
former masters.” To the shock of Henry W. Ravenel, blacks in a nearby
town not only were armed but openly displayed their weapons and drilled,
apparently modeling themselves after the black troops they had only re¬
cently observed. It became clear to Ravenel, as it eventually did to Union
commanders, that some way would have to be found to deal with such an
ominous situation. The "summary executions” of some of the leaders, Rave¬
nel thought, had already had "a beneficial effect” and he suggested more
of the same . 91

Like the gallows the slaves in Louisiana had erected for their master,
the terror and suspicions aroused by the fears of slave violence became
more important than the actual number of incidents. The anticipated
uprisings never materialized in New Orleans, Charleston, Wilmington,
Lynchburg, and other localities where rumors to that effect had kept white
residents in a constant state of anxiety and readiness. Nonetheless, the
fears never seemed to subside, even after the much-dreaded day had passed
without incident. "We are slumbering on a volcano,” the newspaper in
Wilmington editorialized. "[T]he general eruption is likely to occur at any
time.” The mere sight of unfamiliar blacks in the vicinity was enough to
unsettle the local whites. "As we passed through our quarters,” Kate Stone
wrote, "there were numbers of strange Negro men standing around. They
had gathered from the neighboring places. They did not say anything, but
they looked at us and grinned and that terrified us more and more. It held
such a promise of evil .” 92

Recognizing the unpredictability of black behavior, there was every
reason for slaveholding families to be apprehensive. After the experiences
some of them had endured, and the incredible scenes they had witnessed,
they also came to be that much more appreciative of those slaves whose
attachment to the family never seemed to waver. The "faithful few” stood
out. That in itself had to be a frightening comment on the system the slave
owners had so methodically erected.

Although white Southerners would weave heroic images and tales into
the legend of the faithful slave, both exaggerating and simplifying his
wartime behavior, they did not simply create him out of a vivid imagina¬
tion or a troubled conscience. Such slaves existed in sufficient numbers to
warrant the oratorical tributes and legislative resolutions of gratitude.
Whether their loyalty rested on genuine attachment, habit, fear, or sheer
opportunism usually defied detection. What mattered to whites was that
they fulfilled the highest expectations of their masters and mistresses. The

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

runaways, the pillagers, the insubordinate could be charged to subversive
Yankee influences. How much more comforting and reassuring it was to
recall those slaves who remained "faithful through everything,” proving
themselves "superior to temptations which might have shaken white peo¬
ple” and "shirking no debt of love and gratitude” to those who owned them.
Risking even the hostility of their own people, the "faithful few,” including
those legendary white-haired "uncles” and devoted "mammies,” tried to
protect their "white folks,” stood in the doorway of the Big House to block
the entrance of the soldiers, refused to divulge where the valuables were
hidden, and scolded the Yankees for their "insolence.” 93 With one leg
bandaged, and feigning lameness (to avoid conscription), the servant of
Mary Kirkland advised his mistress to stand up, keep her children in her
arms, and remain calm while the Yankees pillaged the house. He then
imparted to her a valuable lesson he had learned as her slave: "Don’t
answer ’em back, Miss Mary. Let them say what they want to. Don’t give
’em any chance to say you are impudent to ’em.” 94

To dissemble or "play dumb” had been effective ploys during slavery
to mislead the master and obtain special advantages. The samp kind of
deception was now used by some slaves, particularly the house servants, to
mislead the Yankees and protect the master and mistress. To save the
family’s silverware which he had secreted, an elderly slave on a South
Carolina plantation tried to impress the Yankee soldiers with how much
he hated his "white folks,” even slapping the master’s children to demon¬
strate his loyalty to the Union cause. (He was said to have "cried like a child
afterwards because he 'had to hit Mas’ Horace’s children.’ ”) In Richmond,
to preserve his mistress’s house, a servant deceived the Yankees into think¬
ing she was "a good Union woman.” (Actually, the family was passionately
pro-Confederate and had to be restrained from hanging the flag outside
their window.) When asked about the location of the silver (which she had
helped to hide), Hannah, a Mississippi house servant, told the Yankees it
had all been sent "to Georgia or somewhyar a long time ago.” ("The silver
and plate had been in Hannah’s charge for years,” her mistress explained,
"and she did not wish to see it go out of the family.”) To thwart Yankee
pillagers, Ida Adkins abandoned deception for direct action—she turned
over the beehives: "Dey lit on dem blue coats an’ every time dey lit dey
stuck in a pizen sting. De Yankees forgot all about de meat an’ things dey
done stole; they took off down de road on a run.” The grateful mistress
rewarded her with a gold ring. 95

,When confronted with Yankee threats and insolence, the "faithful
few” often stood their ground and defended the lives and property of their
owners. Booker T. Washington would later try to explain such loyalty:
The slaves would give the Yankee soldiers food, drink, clothing—anything
but that which had been specifically intrusted to their care and honour.”
Hoisted up by his two thumbs, a South Carolina slave still refused to
divulge where he had hidden his master’s money and gold watch. After her
master had been taken prisoner, a loyal housegirl clung to the trunk filled

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151

with valuables, thereby earning for herself the highest possible praise a
slave owner could bestow: "She’s black outside, but she’s white inside,
shore!” Individual feats ofheroism would become legendary, along with the
tales of how the slaves pleaded with the Yankees not to burn the master’s
house and the ways in which they came to the defense of the white women.
Even the most grateful white families might have found it difficult to
fathom the quality of loyalty that could induce a young slave on a South
Carolina plantation to save her mistress from rape by taking her place!
That same kind of loyalty may have saved the life of John Williams, a
Louisiana planter, whom the Yankees had ordered either to dance for them
or to make his slaves dance.

Dar he stood inside a big ring of dem mens in blue clothes, wid dey brass
buttons shining in de light from de fire dey had in front of de tents, and
he jest stood and said nothing, and it look lak he wasn’t wanting to tell
us to dance.

So some of us young bucks jest step up and say we was good dancers,
and we start shuffling while de rest of de niggers pat.

Some nigger women go back to de quarters and git de gourd fiddles
and de clapping bones made out’n beef ribs, and bring dem back so we
could have some music. We git all warmed up and dance lak we never
did dance befo’! I speck we invent some new steps dat night!

The slave performers appear to have satisfied the soldiers; more impor¬
tantly, they felt they had saved their master from unnecessary humiliation
and physical violence. "We act lak we dancing for de Yankees,” one of the
slaves later recalled, "but we trying to please Master and old Mistress more
than anything, and purty soon he begin to smile a little and we all feel a
lot better .” 96

The tales of slave heroism and sacrifice made the rounds of southern
white society and no doubt cheered many a listener who had yet to face his
moment of crisis. But the reassurances were at best ephemeral, and the
doubtful remained doubtful. Unlike the popular toy Negro that danced
minstrel-style when wound up, black men and women refused to conform to
any predictable pattern of behavior. If they had, the white South might
have felt less compelled to celebrate the feats of loyalty as though they
were extraordinary and exceptional rather than what anyone should have
expected of his slaves. "Such faithfulness among so faithful few deserves
to be recorded,” Emma Holmes wrote of a slave who had saved the valu¬
ables of the family to whom he belonged. What made the behavior of the
"faithful few” so praiseworthy was the mounting evidence of desertion,
disaffection, and "betrayal.” "Five thousand negroes followed their Yankee
brothers from the town and neighborhood,” Sarah Morgan noted; "but ours
remained.” Mary Chesnut contrasted the exemplary conduct of her blacks
with stories of recent outrages, and concluded that she had been among the
fortunate.

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

They [her friends] talked of Negroes who flocked to the Yankees and
showed them where the silver and valuables were hid by the white peo¬
ple; lady’s maids dressing themselves in their mistress’s gowns before
their very faces and walking off. Before this, everyone has told me how
kind and faithful and considerate the Negroes had been. I am sure, after
Hon rin g these tales, the fidelity of my own servants shines out brilliantly.
I had taken it too much as a matter of course. 97

From the outset of the war, the character of the slaves’ affections for
their "white folks” had been a common topic of conversation and specula¬
tion. With the steady advance of the Union Army, particularly after 1863,
the conversations turned increasingly gloomy as the behavior of the slaves
became increasingly inexplicable. Previous assumptions needed to be reex¬
amined, and new answers were required for the old questions. What lay
behind the professions of fidelity? What lurked beneath the slaves’ appar¬
ent indifference? How genuine was their attachment to the master and his
famil y? How far could they be trusted? The answers did not come easily.
After observing the conduct of the slaves in his region, Henry W. Ravenel
found two "exhibitions of character” he had never anticipated. On many
plantations "where there was really kind treatment & mutual attach¬
ment,” the coming of the Yankees suddenly snapped the old ties. At the
same time, numerous slaves resisted the temptations placed before them
and remained, in his view, docile and submissive. With the blacks exhibit¬
ing such contradictory tendencies, Ravenel seemed to suggest the utter
impossibility of calculating their loyalty. 98

The "defections” were bad enough. But the "betrayals” within the
plantation and Big House proved even more troubling, in part because they
were more brazen, might be committed in the presence of the white family,
and often involved the most trusted blacks. Even on the places where most
slaves remained loyal, the fact that only one did not might spell the differ¬
ence between a family keeping or losing its most valuable possessions. "All
of our servants remained faithful except the cook,” a North Carolina
woman wrote, but it was the cook who told the Union soldiers where the
meat was hidden. On the plantation of Joseph Howell, the Yankees held
"a court of inquiry,” questioned each slave individually about the location
of the master’s valuables, and then went directly to the spot where they had
been hidden. "Must have been a Judas ’mongst us,” recalled Henry D.
Jenkins, who had been a slave there. 99

For the white families, as they came to understand more fully the
explosive potential of each of their slaves, such experiences were both
bewildering and humiliating. How were the stalwart defenders of the "pe¬
culiar institution” to evaluate the behavior of those "petted and trusted”
slaves in Virginia who burned the overseer’s house and deserted their aged,
bedridden mistress after stripping the woman of her clothing? No less
perplexed had to be the Confederate officer in South Carolina, the owner
of several plantations, who found himself a prisoner of his own slaves, the

Kingdom Cornin'

153

very same slaves whose virtues and fidelity he had only recently praised.
Manifesting their delight over this turnabout, they even improvised some
verses while taking him to the nearest Union camp.

O Massa a rebel , we row him to prison.
Hallelujah.

Massa no whip us any more.

Hallelujah.

We have no massa, now; we free.
Hallelujah.

We have the Yankees, who no run away.
Hallelujah.

O! all our old massas run away.
Hallelujah.

O! massa going to prison now.
Hallelujah.

Stories such as these confirmed the increasingly gloomy talk about the
fragile nature of the black man's affections for his "white folks." Were
these truly the same individuals they had known so intimately as slaves,
who had assured them of their loyalty, who had repeatedly denied any
desire to be free? Little wonder that some whites simply threw up their
hands in utter disgust over such examples of ingratitude and treachery.
"Those their masters had put most confidence in,” a Virginia woman
wrote, had revealed everything to the Yankees; the soldiers located pistols,
guns, and uniforms in a secret place "that no one but the servants knew
anything about. I am beginning to lose confidence in the whole race. ” 100
Few thought to ask the slaves to explain their apparent "betrayal” of
the white families they had once served so faithfully. It remained easier to
blame the Yankees and to cling to the notion that most slaves retained an
affection for their "white folks” but feared to show it in the presence of the
soldiers. Near Opelousas, Louisiana, a black youth rushed out of his cabin
to tell a passing Union officer where his master had hidden two splendid
horses. Although grateful for the information, the officer thought to ask the
youth why he had betrayed his master's prize possession: "You ought to
have more love for him than to do such a thing.” Without the slightest
hesitation, the slave replied, "When my master begins to lub me, den it’ll
be time enough for me to lub him. What I wants is to get away. I want you
to take me off from dis plantation, where I can be free.” Few whites were
privy to the private conversations of their slaves; in the master’s presence,
of course, a slave chose his words carefully and rarely betrayed his real
feelings if they seemed inappropriate at the time. When Kate Stone’s
brother ventured back to the family home in Louisiana, which they had
abandoned, he had the rare opportunity to overhear a conversation be¬
tween two of the remaining servants, one of whom was Aunt Lucy, the
principal housekeeper. The two slaves sat before a fire drinking coffee and

154

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

discussing the merits of their mistress, Amanda Stone. Remaining well
hidden, James Stone heard enough to make a full report when he returned
to the exiled family. Not only had Lucy and Maria abused his mother
verbally but they referred to her always as "that Woman,” talked exult¬
antly of strutting about in her clothes and replacing her as the mistress,
and heaped scorn upon the entire family. 101

The number of slaves who "betrayed” their masters, ran away, became
insubordinate, or remained faithful defies any precise statistical break¬
downs. Conceivably, if slave behavior could be quantified, the results might
suggest that a majority of slaves (particularly in the areas untouched by
the Union Army) remained with their masters, at least for the duration of
the war. But this would prove to be a highly misleading criterion for
determining loyalty or fidelity. The master cared less about percentages of
faithfulness in the neighborhood than how he could be reasonably certain
of the conduct of his own slaves. More than anything else, the uncertainty
depressed him. Manifestations of disaffection could sometimes be dismissed
with the observation that the slave in question "had always been a bad
Negro,” or "we always considered him a most dangerous character,” or he
"has been a runaway from childhood.” The mounting anguish of the mas¬
ter, however, often coincided with the realization that the previous de¬
meanor ofhis slaves, the efficiency and loyalty with which they had served
him, the antebellum record of mischief and devotion simply offered no
reliable clues as to how they would behave when the Union Army came
into the neighborhood or when they were informed of their freedom. 102

Within the same household and plantation, the pattern of "betrayal”
and "loyalty” created bewilderment, dismay, and surprise. The old distinc¬
tions a master had been able to draw between the "good slaves” and the
"bad niggers” were no longer dependable. "Jonathan, whom we trusted,
betrayed us,” Mary Chesnut wrote. "The plantation house and mills, and
Mulberry House were saved by Claiborne, that black rascal who was sus¬
pected by all the world.” Few of Adele Allston’s slaves behaved more
faithfully than did Little Andrew, "whom we never had felt sure of” and
had thought would desert to the Yankees. In Camden, South Carolina,
Emma Holmes wrote of a family in which "the old, favored family servant”
betrayed them while a young slave "formerly so careless and saucy, proved
true as steel.” 103

If slaveholding families came to be alarmed by the extent of the disaf¬
fection, the implications for their self-image as benign and benevolent
patriarchs could be even more disturbing, sometimes downright traumatiz¬
ing. No more plaintive cry resounded through slaveholding society than
that the slaves in whom they had placed the greatest trust and confidence
were the very first to "betray” them. If this complaint recurred most fre¬
quently, perhaps that was because it seemed least comprehensible. "Those
we loved best, and who loved us best—as we thought—were the first to
leave us,” a Virginian lamented, voicing an experience that would leave so
many families incredulous. To Robert P. Howell, a North Carolina planter

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who had lost a number of slaves, the behavior of Lovet "disappointed” him
the most. "He was about my age and I had always treated him more as a
companion than a slave. When I left I put everything in his charge, told
him that he was free, but to remain on the place and take care of things.
He promised me faithfully that he would, but he was the first one to leave
... and I did not see him for several years.” To the wife of a prominent
Louisiana slaveholder, the most troubling defection was that of "a colored
woman born in the same house with me, always treated as well as me,
always till my marriage slept in the same bed with me, and now, she is the
first to leave.” John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, least expected to hear
of Tom’s departure—"he is the first to leave me & had thought would have
been the last one to go”—while Louis Manigault, the rice planter, found
himself at a loss to explain why the slave he esteemed most highly should
have been "the very first to murmur” and "give trouble.” 104

To whom could masters and mistresses turn for comfort and reassur¬
ance if not to the old family favorites, the legendary "aunties” and "un¬
cles,” with whom they had lived so intimately, who had reared them as
children, who had regaled them so often with their stories and songs, and
who had shared with them the family tragedies and celebrations. But these
slaves, too, refused to comply with the expectations of those who claimed
to own them. "Even old Cirus went,” a perplexed Mississippian observed.
"I reckon he is over a hundred years old.” Equally bewildered, Alexander
and Cornelia Pope of Washington, Georgia, learned of "the rascality” of
Uncle Lewis. This "old gray-haired darkey,” wrote Eliza Andrews, a neigh¬
bor and niece of the Popes, "has done nothing for years but live at his ease,
petted and coddled and believed in by the whole family. The children called
him, not 'Uncle Lewis,’ but simply 'Uncle,’ as if he had really been kin to
them.” During the family prayers, he sat in a special place and was fre¬
quently called upon to lead the worship. "I have often listened to his
prayers when staying at Aunty’s, and was brought up with as firm a belief
in him as in the Bible itself.” Here, then, was the very prototype of the
faithful servant, venerated by his owners and the townspeople as "an
honored institution.” With the coming of the Yankees, Uncle Lewis not
only deserted but told "a pack of lies” about his mistress and claimed a
portion of the family lands. Although the Popes no longer tolerated his
presence, the memories of their "fallen saint” and his startling betrayal
lingered on. 105

The behavior of an Uncle Lewis clearly overshadowed in significance
if not in actual numbers those celebrated examples of wartime fidelity. The
planter found it easier to resign himself to the defection of the field hands,
for he may have had little direct contact with them, particularly if he
employed an overseer or driver, and they could not be expected to have as
strong an attachment to their "white folks.” But the conduct of the house
servants, whom he thought he knew so well and no doubt felt he had
pampered, most of whom had given him years of loyal service, raised
questions which few slaveholding families wanted to confront. After awak-

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

ening one morning to discover that every one of his servants had decamped,
a Georgia planter found himself revising assumptions he had never
thought to question. "We had thought there was a strong bond of affection
on their side as well as ours! We have ministered to them in sinkness,
infancy, and age.” Not all masters failed to appreciate the attraction of
freedom, and a few treated the slaves’ aspirations with the respect they
deserved. After losing a trusted slave, James Alcorn, a Mississippi planter,
experienced the usual humiliation over being deceived but he stopped short
of condemnation and had little difficulty in ascertaining the cause. "I feel
that had I been in his place I should have gone, so good by Hadley, you have
heretofore been faithful, that you should espouse your liberty but shows
your sense. I wish you no harm.” Unlike Alcorn, most planters reacted with
outrage and bewilderment, suffering a severe shock to their egos as well as
their pocketbooks, and demanded to know why their trusted servants fled
a situation in which they appeared to be perfectly content. 108

The house servants achieved a reputation as the "white niggers” and
"Uncle Toms” of slavery, who identified with and tried to emulate their
masters, and whose disdain for the field hands was exceeded only by the
pride they felt in their quality "white folks.” "We house slaves thought we
was better’n the others what worked in the field,” a former Tennessee
bondsman recalled. "We really was raised a little different, you know...”
From the vantage point of the fields, a former South Carolina slave con¬
firmed a common impression: "De house servants put on more airs than de
white folks.” Contrary to this image of a slave hierarchy, house servants
and field hands actually spent a great deal of time together, not only in the
slave quarters which they often shared (sometimes as husband and wife,
with one working in the house and the other in the field) but in the daily
agricultural operations, with the servants often called upon to help at
harvest time. In the few urban centers (like Charleston, New Orleans, and
Richmond) and on the relatively small number of large "aristocratic” plan¬
tations (like those of low-country South Carolina and the Mississippi
River), house servants approximated an elite class that lived up to the
legend. Elsewhere, the lines were not so clearly drawn between field and
house slaves. Typically, the slave quarters rather than the Big House
constituted the real social world for most slaves; consequently, few house
servants were unconcerned about how their fellow slaves judged them and
many of them acted as an intermediary between the Big House and the
quarters. Although some field hands spoke scornfully of the superior airs
of house slaves, many relished the tales of life inside the Big House and
took a vicarious delight in watching house slaves deceive their masters and
mistresses. 107

The distinctions between house and field slaves seem more pronounced
in the literature than in the day-to-day operations of slavery. Sufficient
examples of the elite house servant lording it over his or her fellow slaves
were always on hand, however, to sustain and reinforce the prevailing
image. The accounts of both fugitive slaves and planter families lent fur-

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ther "inside” credence to that view. While the number of defections in¬
creased each day, Susan Smedes wrote, George Page, her father’s servant,
"tried to make up in himself for what he looked on as the lack of loyalty
on the part of the other servants. They were field Negroes; he belonged to
the house.” Similarly, in the Allston household, Mammy Milly "held her¬
self and her family as vastly superior to the ordinary run of negroes, the
aristocracy of the race.” Nevertheless, surprisingly large numbers of house
servants fled at the first opportunity, sometimes entire households, and if
they remained, many of them refused to wait upon their masters and
mistresses, coveted possession of the Big House and its contents (even
Mammy Milly fell under suspicion), and "behaved outrageously.” After
being told by Union soldiers that he was free, the coachman of a Virginia
family headed directly for his master’s chamber, attired himself in the
master’s finest clothes, and took his watch and chain and walking stick.
Returning to the parlor, where his master sat, the slave "insolently” in¬
formed him that henceforth he could drive his own coach. 108

The range of conduct exemplified by George Page and the Virginia
coachman prompted whites to seek some plausible explanation that might
be translated into appropriate action. But the initial assumptions they
made about slave behavior rendered any real analysis impossible. What
they found so difficult to believe was that their slaves might have developed
their own standards of accepted behavior and evolved their own concepts
of freedom. It was so much easier to think that the troublesome slaves, the
defectors, and the rebels were simply not themselves, that they had been
misled, that their minds had been contaminated by outside influences.
After a Richmond slave denounced Jefferson Davis and refused to serve
any white man, a local editor demanded that he "be whipped every day
until he confesses what white man put these notions in his head.” There
had to be an explanation which slaveholding families could accept without
in any way compromising their self-esteem or the fundamental conviction
that slavery was the best possible condition for black people. To pretend
that the Yankees instigated slave aggression and enticed and forced slaves
to desert their masters proved to be a highly popular explanation, since it
contained a semblance of truth and conveniently evaded the hard ques¬
tions. "The poor negroes don’t do us any harm except when they are put
up to it,” Eliza Andrews thought. "Even when they murdered that white
man and quartered him, I believe pernicious teachings were responsi¬
ble.” 109

Although many whites gave public voice to this charge, few thought
it adequately explained the rate of desertion and betrayal. The more they
reflected over their own experiences, as well as their neighbors’, slavehold¬
ers came increasingly to question the lax discipline and familiarity which,
they now argued, had produced pampered, spoiled, and overly indulged
servants. "It has now been proven,” Louis Manigault maintained, "that
those Planters who were the most indulgent to their Negroes when we were
at peace, have since the commencement of the war encountered the great-

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

est trouble in the management of this species of property.” Nor was that
observation peculiar to Manigault’s rice plantations, for Julia LeGrand
made precisely the same point based on her experience in New Orleans.
"So many people have been betrayed by pet servants. Strange that some
of the most severe mistresses and masters have kept their servants through
all this trying year.” After noting how the most indulged slaves had turned
out to be "the meanest” and least trustworthy, a Georgia planter indicated
that his wartime experience left him with only one conclusion: "A nigger
has got to know you’re his master, and then when he understands that he’s

content_Flail a nigger and he knows you.” That was, of course, time-

honored advice. By nature, it had long been held, blacks required rigid
discipline and the full exercise of the master’s authority; without those
restraints, they would revert back to the barbarism from which they had
emerged. The closer blacks approached a state of freedom, the more un¬
manageable and dangerous they became. 110

To understand why their most trusted slaves turned against them,
most masters need not have looked beyond their own households. The
answer usually lay somewhere in that complex and often ambivalent rela¬
tionship between a slave and his "white folks,” in the intimacy and depend¬
ency which infused those relations and created both mutual affection and
un b earable tension in the narrow quarters of the Big House. Unlike the
field slave, who enjoyed a certain degree of anonymity and a prescribed
leisure time, the house servant stood always at the beck and call of each
member of the master’s family, worked under their watchful eyes, and had
to bear the brunt of their capricious moods. The very same family that
petted and coddled him might at any time make him the butt of their jokes,
the object of their frustrations, the victim of their pettiness. He had to learn
how to be the "good nigger,” to submit to indignities without protest, to
submerge his feelings, to repress his emotions, to play "dumb” when the
occasion demanded it, to respond with the proper gestures and words to
every command, to learn the uses of flattery and humility, to never appear
overly intelligent. He was expected to acquire and to exhibit at all times
what a Georgia slaveholder defined as “a house look. ” The quality of bond¬
age to which he submitted could be measured neither by the number of
beatings he sustained nor by the privileges and indulgences he enjoyed.
What took the heaviest toll, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, had to be "the
enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the
standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenseless¬
ness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any
sort of individual.” 111

That a certain intimacy characterized the slave-master relationship in
the Big House reveals little about the conflicting feelings it generated and
the precarious base on which it often rested. To live in close day-to-day
contact with his master, to know his capacity for deceit and cunning, to
know him as few of the field hands could, enabled some slaves to hate him
that much more, with an intensity and fervor that only intimate knowledge

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159

could have produced. Recalling her many years as the cook in a North
Carolina family, Aunt Delia suggested ways in which a house slave might
choose to manifest that feeling: "How many times I spit in the biscuits and
peed in the coffee just to get back at them mean white folks.” The easy
familiarity that pervaded service in the Big House made not only for
ambiguity but for a potentially volatile situation. 112

Even if the master had been a model of virtue and propriety, there was
no assurance that the blacks he had most indulged would remain faithful
to him. Recalling their own experiences, William Wells Brown and Freder¬
ick Douglass, both of whom ultimately escaped to the North, testified that
beneficent treatment, much more than abuse, had intensified their dissatis¬
faction with bondage. The better treated he was, Brown explained, the
more miserable he became, the more he appreciated liberty, the more he
detested the bondage that confined and restrained him. "If a slave has a
bad master,” Douglass observed, "his ambition is to get a better; when he
gets a better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he
aspires to be his own master.” To make a contented slave, he added, was
to make a thoughtless slave. Rather than being grateful for his ability to
read and write, he recalled those times when he envied the "stupidity” of
his fellow slaves. "It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that
tormented me.” On this point, then, Brown, Douglass, and the slaveholding
class found themselves in unusual agreement, and the wartime experience
demonstrated in scores of instances the validity of their observation: the
best-treated, the most indulged, the most intelligent slaves might be ex¬
pected to be the first ones to "betray” their masters. 113

No plantation slave exercised greater authority than did the driver or
foreman. The position he occupied as the director of labor and as an inter¬
mediary between the Big House and the quarters made him a crucial figure
in the wartime crisis and in the subsequent transition to free labor. The
driver dispatched the slaves to the fields, set the work pace and supervised
performance of the daily tasks, maintained order in the quarters, settled
disputes among slaves, and shared supervisory duties with the overseer or,
quite commonly, combined the functions of driver and overseer. In a con¬
flict between the overseer and the driver, the driver’s judgment might in
many instances prevail; the very maintenance of discipline often de¬
manded that his authority be sustained. "I constantly endeavored to do
nothing which would cause them [the slaves] to lose their respect for him
[the driver],” the manager of a plantation in South Carolina noted. With
that same objective in mind, many planters provided the driver with better
clothing, granted certain privileges to his wife, and always made a point
of reprimanding him in private rather than in the presence of other
slaves. 114

In the literature and folklore of slavery, the driver enjoyed at best a
mixed reputation, usually reflecting the ways in which he exerted his
power to exact labor and mete out punishments. If the "Uncle Toms” came
to dominate the legend of the house slave, the black "Simon Legrees”

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

seemed to prevail in the characterization of the driver. Henry Cheatam, a
former Mississippi slave, recalled the driver as "de meanest debil dat eber
libbed on de Lawd’s green earth. I promise myself when I growed up dat
I was agoin’ to kill dat nigger iffen it was de las’ thing I eber done.” To make
matters worse, that driver along with the mistress ran the plantation after
the death of the master in the war. In a song overheard by Colonel Thomas
Higginson, some of his black troops improvised verses that reflected the
prevailing image of the driver. And as with the house slave, sufficient
examples abounded to make it quite plausible.

O, de ole nigger-driver!

O, gwine awayI

Fust ting my mammy tell me,

O, gwine away!

Tell me *bout de nigger-driver,

O, gwine away!

Nigger-driver second devil,

0, gwine away!

Best ting for do he driver,

0, gwine away!

Knock he down and spoil he labor,

0, gwine away!

After the war, on those plantations where the driver had a reputation for
cruelty, the freedmen demanded his removal before they would consent to
work. 115

If a master maintained confidence in any of his slaves, outside of a few
of the venerable "uncles” and "aunties,” he most likely trusted the driver.
He had personally chosen this man for his loyalty, competence, and de¬
pendability, believing him capable of managing the plantation in his ab¬
sence. But the master also selected a driver who commanded the respect
and obedience of the slaves, and this leadership role was apt to create
conflicting loyalties. When the Yankees arrived, numerous drivers ex¬
ercised leadership and influence in ways few masters had dared to con¬
template. On one of the Allston plantations, Jesse Belflowers, the much-
harassed overseer, traced the prevailing disorder and the misconduct of the
slaves to the driver. He "is not behaveing write,” Belflowers reported, "he
doant talk write before the People.” Not far from this scene, Confederate
scouts captured and hanged a driver for his "treachery.” When a number
of slaves fled a Georgia plantation to join General Sherman’s army, "the
leading spirit” as well as the youngest of the group was the driver, de¬
scribed by one Union officer as a "very quick and manly fellow, a model,
physically.” Not only did some drivers desert to the Yankees, but they were
likely as well to take other slaves with them, and in several instances the
driver directed the seizure of deserted plantations and helped to wreak
vengeance on masters and overseers. A South Carolina planter and his son

Kingdom Cornin'

161

were shot and seriously wounded while riding in their carriage near the
plantation; the band of blacks who ambushed them had been "led on by his
Driver.” After blacks had seized one of his plantations, Charles Manigault
accused the driver of aspiring to be "lord & master of everything there' 9

Frederick (the Driver) was ringleader, & at the head of all the iniquity
committed there . He encouraged all the Negroes to believe that the
Farm, and everything on it, now since Emancipation, belonged solely to
him, & that their former owners had now no rights, or control there
whatever.

No less dismayed, Edmund Ruffin described the exodus of blacks from his
son’s plantation, Marlboume, along with the decision of those who re¬
mained to refuse to work. "My former black overseer, Jem Sykes,” he
added, "who for the last seven years of my proprietorship, kept my keys,
& was trusted with everything, even when I & every other white was absent
from 4 to 6 weeks at a time, acted precisely with all his fellows.” If the
driver remained on the plantation, as he usually did, he might also assume
the responsibility for informing the slaves of their freedom and initiating
negotiations with the master for a labor contract. 116

When some planters came to assess the wartime disaster that deprived
them of an enslaved work force, they did not hesitate to project much of
their anger and frustration on the trusted drivers. "The drivers every¬
where have proved the worst negroes,” a Louisiana planter concluded.
Actually, the record varied considerably, and as many planters voiced
satisfaction and admiration for the ways in which their drivers managed
to sustain agricultural operations and control the labor force during the
war and in some instances run the entire plantation in their absence. With
a number of slaves manifesting their discontent, Louis Manigault was
much relieved to learn that Driver John "is still the same”; and since he
deemed John "a Man of great importance” to the plantation, Manigault
advised his father to furnish him with all the items the driver had re¬
quested—boots, a coat, a hat, a watch, and ample clothing. On the South
Carolina Sea Islands, particularly on the smaller plantations, the drivers
remained after the masters fled and succeeded in supervising and planting
food crops and in maintaining a semblance of order and discipline. Im¬
pressed with the leadership and knowledge of plantation operations exhib¬
ited by these drivers, Union officers viewed them as a crucial stabilizing
factor in the transition to free labor and tried to bolster their authority,
particularly on the larger plantations where it had been seriously under¬
mined by the absence of whites. 117

Recognizing the influence many of the drivers retained over the freed
slaves, planters went to considerable lengths after the war to maintain
their services. Once again, the driver found himself caught between con¬
flicting loyalties. Through the driver, the planter hoped to retain the bulk
of his labor force on the most favorable terms, though in a few instances

162

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

he would have to dismiss an unpopular driver to keep any of his former
slaves. Through the driver, on the other hand, many former slaves hoped
to present a united front to the employer and exact concessions from him
that would make their labor sufficiently remunerative and less arduous. In
many of these postwar arrangements, the planter and the driver, both
leaders in their own ways, seemed to have reached a tacit understanding
about the division of power. On a plantation near Lexington, Tennessee,
the driver—Jordan Pyles—had fled with the Yankees and had served in the
Union Army. When he returned to the plantation after the war, he "was
a changed nigger and all de whites and a lot of de niggers hated him,” his
stepson recalled. "All ’cepting old Master, and he never said a word out of
de way to him. Jest tol him to come on and work on de place as long as he
wanted to.” Whatever the hostility that initially greeted him, Jordan Pyles
must have retained much of the leadership quality and influence he had
previously exercised, for in 1867 he would be elected a delegate to the
Radical state convention. 118

Among the field hands, the house servants, the skilled black artisans,
and the slave drivers, the Civil War provoked a wide range of behavior.
Contrary to the legends of "docility” and "militancy,” the slaves did not
sort themselves out into Uncle Toms and Nat Turners any more than
masters divided neatly into the "mean” and the "good.” Rebelliousness,
resistance, and accommodation might manifest themselves at different
times in the same slave, depending on his own perception of reality. Rare
was that slave, no matter how degraded, no matter how effusively he
professed his fidelity, who did not contain within him a capacity for out¬
rage. Whether or not that outrage ever surfaced, how much longer it would
remain muted was the terrible reality every white man and woman had to
live with and could never really escape. The tensions this uncertainty
generated could at times prove to be unbearable. "The loom room had
caught from some hot ashes,” Kate Stone confided to her diary, "but we at
once thought Jane [the slave cook] was wreaking vengeance on us all by
trying to bum us out. We would not have been surprised to have her slip
up and stick any of us in the back.” If the vast majority of slaves refrained
from aggressive acts and remained on the plantations, most of them were
neither "rebellious” nor 'Yaithful” in the fullest sense of those terms, but
rather ambivalent and observant, some of them frankly opportunistic,
many of them anxious to preserve their anonymity, biding their time,
searching for opportunities to break the dependency that bound them to
their white families. "There is quite a difference of manner among the
negroes,” a South Carolina white woman noted in March 1865, "but I think
it proceeds from an uncertainty as to what their condition will be, they do
not know if they are free or not, and their manner is a sort of feeler by
which they will find out how far they can go.” 119

The war revealed, often in ways that defied description, the sheer
complexity of the master-slave relationship, and the conflicts, contradic¬
tions, and ambivalence that relationship generated in each individual. The
slave’s emotions and behavior invariably rested on a precarious balance

Kingdom Cornin’

163

between the habit of obedience and the intense desire for freedom. The
same humble, self-effacing slave who touched his hat to his "white folks”
was capable of touching off the fire that gutted his master’s house. The
loyal body servant who risked his life to carry his wounded master to safety
remounted his master’s horse and fled to the Yankees. The black boatman
lionized by the Richmond press for his denunciation of the Yankees and
enlistment as a Confederate recruit deserted to the Union lines with valu¬
able information and "twenty new rebel uniforms.” The house slave who
nursed her mistress through a terrible illness, always evincing love and
affection, even weeping over her condition, deserted her when the moment
seemed right—"when I was scarce able to walk without assistance—she
left me without provocation or reason—left me in the night, and that too
without the slightest noise.” On the Jones plantation, near Herndon,
Georgia, the house servant had given no warm welcome to the Union
soldiers. She dutifully looked after the white children entrusted to her care.
"I suckled that child, Hattie,” she boasted, "all these children suckled by
colored women.” And yet, when the Yankees threatened to burn down her
master’s house, Louisa made no protest. "It ought to be burned,” she told
a Union officer. "Why?” the astonished officer asked her, for he had been
rather moved by her fidelity to the family and her apparent devotion to the
children. "Cause there has been so much devilment here,” she replied,
"whipping niggers most to death to make ’em work to pay for it .” 120

To place the blame for slave disaffection on lax discipline or outside
influences, as so many slaveholders chose to do, was to make the same false
assumptions about blacks. If the war taught slaveholders anything, it
should have revealed how little they actually knew their blacks, how they
had mistaken the slave’s outward demeanor for his inner feelings, his
docility for contentment and acquiescence, and how in numerous instances
they had been deliberately deceived so that they might later be the more
easily betrayed. The conduct of slaves during the recent crisis, a South
Carolina planter conceded, should have impressed upon every slaveholding
family that "we were all laboring under a delusion.”

Good masters and bad masters all alike, shared the same fate—the sea
of the Revolution confounded good and evil; and, in the chaotic turbu¬
lence, all suffer in degree. Bom and raised amid the institution, like a
great many others, I believed it was necessary, to our welfare, if not to
our very existence. I believed that these people were content, happy, and
attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to
change these opinions.... If they were content, happy and attached to
their masters, why did they desert him in the moment of his need and
flock to an enemy, whom they did hot know; and thus left their, perhaps
really good masters whom they did know from infancy ? 121

Whatever happened in the future, no matter what kind of South
emerged from the ruins, it seemed certain that the relations which masters
and slaves alike had enjoyed or tolerated in the past would never be quite
the same again.

When the Union Army neared his Savannah River plantations, Louis
Manigault fled. That was December 1864. More than two years later, hav¬
ing leased the plantations to a former Confederate officer, Manigault de¬
cided to visit the place for the first time since his hasty departure and assess
the impact of the war. Traveling along the familiar roads between Savan¬
nah and his plantations, he noted traces of previous army encampments,
the twisted ruins of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, and the re¬
mains of what had once been a magnificent neighboring mansion. Upon
entering the plantations, he was greeted enthusiastically by his former
slave cooper, George, who still called him "Maussa.” Standing next to the
ruins of his country house, Manigault recalled how he had spent here "the
most happy period” of his childhood. All that remained of the house was
a tall chimney and some scattered bricks which the slaves had not stolen
and sold in Savannah. Except for the "Negro Houses,” which he had con¬
structed just before the war, the entire settlement had "a most abandoned
and forlorn appearance.”

As he approached the old slave quarters, some of the blacks came out
of their cabins, hesitant in their greetings, "not knowing whether under
the new regime it would be proper to meet me politely or not.” Manigault
shook hands with them, called each by his name ("which seemed to please
them highly”), and joked with them about his present plight. "Lord! a
Massy!” he mocked when asked why he had not returned earlier. "You tink
I can lib in de Chimney.” Near the center of the plantation, twelve of his
former slaves greeted him. "They all seemed pleased to see me, calling me
'Maussa’ & the Men still showing respect by taking off their caps.” He
spotted "Captain” Hector, "as cunning as Negroes can be,” his "constant
companion” until the war transformed him into "a great Rascal” and
troublemaker. Hector was now a foreman.

Much to Manigault’s surprise, Jack Savage, the slave he had sold in
Savannah, had returned. "Tall, black, lousy, in rags, & uncombed, kinky,
knotty-hair,” this man had been "the most notoriously bad character &
worst Negro of the place,” the one slave he had thought capable of murder
and arson, and yet acknowledged to be intelligent and an able carpenter.
The two men now shook hands and exchanged "a few friendly remarks.”
To Manigault, it seemed highly ironic that Jack Savage, "the last one I
should have dreamt of,” greeted him, "whilst sitting idly upon the Negro-
House steps dirty & sluggish, I behold young Women to whom I had most
frequently presented Earrings, Shoes, Calicos, Kerchiefs &c, &c,—formerly
pleased to meet me, but now not even lifting the head as I passed.”

Unlike many slaveholders, Louis Manigault had never pretended to
understand his blacks. Before the war, he reflected, fear had largely shaped
the behavior of the slaves, and "we Planters could never get at the truth.”

Kingdom Cornin'

165

Those who claimed to know the Negro were simply deceiving themselves.
"Our 'Northern Brethren’ inform us that we Southerners knew nothing of
the Negro Character. This I have always considered perfectly true , but they
further state that They (the Yankees) have always known the true Charac¬
ter of the Negro which I consider entirely false in the extreme. So deceitful
is the Negro that as far as my own experience extends I could never in a
single instance decipher his character.” Conversing now with his former
slaves, Manigault was suddenly overcome by a strange feeling. "I almost
imagined myself with Chinese, Malays or even the Indians in the interior
of the Philippine Islands.” It was as though he were on alien turf and had
never really known these people who had once been his slaves . 122

Before setting out to make a new life for himself, William Colbert, a former
Alabama slave, looked back for a last time at the old plantation on which
he had spent more than twenty years. He had no reason to regret his
decision to leave. The bondage he had endured had been harsh, reflecting
the temperament of a master who had never hesitated to whip his slaves
severely. "All de niggers ’roun’ hated to be bought by him kaze he wuz so
mean,” Colbert recalled. "When he wuz too tired to whup us he had de
overseer do it; and de overseer wuz meaner dan de massa.” The arrival of
the Yankees had not materially affected their lives. After a few days of
looting, the soldiers had suddenly left "an’ we neber seed ’em since.” After
the war, the blacks only gradually left and the plantation slowly deterio¬
rated. Many years later, reflecting on his experience, Colbert captured with
particular vividness the ambivalence that had necessarily characterized a
slave’s attachment to his master. His recollections were tinged neither
with romantic nostalgia nor with abject hatred. Whatever bitterness he
still felt may have been dissipated both by the passage of time and by the
knowledge that Jim Hodison, his former master, had come to learn in his
own way the dimensions of human tragedy. And that was an experience
William Colbert could easily share with him.

De massa had three boys to go to war, but dere wuzn’t one to come home.

All the chillun he had wuz killed. Massa, he los’ all his money and de
house soon begin droppin’ away to nothin’. Us niggers one by one lef de
ole place and de las’ time I seed de home plantation I wuz a sta n d in ’ on
a hill. I looked back on it for de las’ time through a patch of scrub pines
and it look’ so lonely. Dere wam’t but one person in sight, de massa. He
was a-settin’ in a wicker chair in de yard lookin’ out ober a small field
of cotton and cawn. Dere wuz fo’ crosses in de graveyard in de side lawn
where he wuz a-settin’. De fo’th one wuz his wife. I lost my ole woman
too 37 years ago, and all dis time, I’s been a carrin’ on like de massa—
all alone. 123

After the war, Savilla Burrell left the plantation near Jackson’s Creek,
South Carolina, on which she had been raised as a slave. Not until many

166

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

years later did she return to visit her old master, Tom Still, in his final
days. Sitting there by his side, trying to keep the flies off him, she could
clearly see the lines of sorrow "plowed on dat old face” and she recalled
that time when he had looked so impressive as a captain in the Confederate
cavalry. "It come into my ’membrance de song of Moses: 'de Lord had
triumphed glorily and de hoss and his rider have been throwed into de
sea.’ ” 124

Chapter Four

SLAVES NO MORE

Slavery chain done broke at last!

Broke at last! Broke at last!

Slavery chain done broke at last!

Gonna praise God till I die!

Way up in that valley,

Pray-in on my knees,

Tell-in* God a-bout my troubles.

And to help me if He please.

I did tell him how I suffer.

In the dungeon and the chain;

And the days I went with head bowed down,
An’ my broken flesh and pain.

I did know my Jesus heard me,

’Cause the spirit spoke to me.

An’ said, "Rise, my chile, your children
An’you too shall be free. ”

I done ’p’int one mighty captain
For to marshal all my hosts;

An’ to bring my bleeding ones to me,

An’ not one shall be lost.

Now no more weary trav’lin’,

’Cause my Jesus set me free,

An’ there’s no more auction block for me
Since He give me liberty . 1

O n the night of April 2, 1865, Confederate troops abandoned Rich¬
mond. The sudden decision caught Robert Lumpkin, the well-known
dealer in slaves, with a recently acquired shipment which he had not yet
managed to sell. Desperately, he tried to remove them by the same train
that would carry Jefferson Davis out of the Confederate capital. When
Lumpkin reached the railway station, however, he found a panic-stricken
crowd held back by a line of Confederate soldiers with drawn bayonets.

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Upon learning that he could not remove his blacks, the dealer marched
them back to Lumpkin’s Jail, a two-story brick house with barred windows,
located in the heart of Richmond’s famous slave market—an area known
to local blacks as "the Devil’s Half Acre*” After their return, the slaves
settled down in their cells for still another night, apparently unaware that
this would be their last night of bondage. For Lumpkin, the night would
mark the loss of a considerable investment and the end of a profession. Not
long after the collapse of the Confederacy, however, he took as his legal
wife the black woman he had purchased a decade before and who had
already borne him two children. 2

With Union soldiers nearing the city, a Confederate official thought
the black residents looked as stunned and confused as the whites. "The
negroes stand about mostly silent,” he wrote, "as if wondering what will
be their fate. They make no demonstrations of joy.” Obviously he had not
seen them earlier that day emerging from a church meeting with particu¬
lar exuberance, "shaking hands and exchanging congratulations upon all
sides.” Nor had he heard, probably, that familiar refrain with which local
blacks occasionally regaled themselves: "Richmond town is burning down,
High diddle diddle inctum inctum ah.” Whatever the origins of the song,
the night of the evacuation must have seemed like a prophetic fulfillment.
Explosions set off by the retreating Confederates left portions of the city
in flames and precipitated a night of unrestrained looting and rioting, in
which army deserters and the impoverished residents of Richmond’s white
slum shared the work of expropriation and destruction with local slaves
and free blacks. Black and white women together raided the Confederate
Commissary, while the men rolled wheelbarrows filled with bags of flour,
meal, coffee, and sugar toward their respective shanties. Along the row of
retail stores, a large black man wearing a bright red sash around his waist
directed the looting. After breaking down the doors with the crowbar he
carried on his shoulder, he stood aside while his followers rushed into the
shops and emptied them of their contents. He took nothing for himself,
apparently satisfied to watch the others partake of commodities long de¬
nied them. If only for this night, racial distinctions and customs suddenly
became irrelevant. 3

Determined to reap the honors of this long-awaited triumph, white and
black Yankees vied with each other to make the initial entry into the
Confederate capital. The decision to halt the black advance until the white
troops marched into the city would elicit some bitter comments in the
northern black press. "History will show,” one editor proclaimed, "that
they [the black troops] were in the suburbs of Richmond long before the
white soldiers, and but for the untimely and unfair order to halt, would
have triumphantly planted their banner first upon the battlements of the
capital of r ye greate confederacie. ’ ” Many years later, a former Virginia
slave still brooded over this issue. "Gawdammit, ’twas de nigguhs tuk
Richmond,” he kept insisting. "Ah ain’t nevuh knowed nigguhs—even all
uh dem nigguhs—could mek such uh ruckus. One huge sea uh black faces
filt de streets fum wall tuh wall, an’ dey wan’t nothin’ but nigguhs in sight.”

Slaves No More

169

Regardless of who entered Richmond first, black newspapers and clergy¬
men perceived the hand of God in this ironic triumph. The moment the

government reversed its policy on black recruitment it had doomed the
Confederacy. And now, "as a finishing touch, as though He would speak
audible words of approval to the nation,” God had delivered Richmond—
"that stronghold of treason and wickedness”—into the hands of black sol¬
diers. "This is an admonition to which men, who make war on God would
do well to take heed .” 4

To the black soldiers, many of them recently slaves, this was the
dramatic, the almost unbelievable climax to four years of war that had

promised at the outset to be nothing more than a skirmish to preserve the
Union. Now they were marching into Richmond as free men, amidst
throngs of cheering blacks lining the streets. Within hours, a large crowd
of black soldiers and residents assembled on Broad Street, near "Lumpkin
Alley,” where the slave jails, the auction rooms, and the offices of the slave
traders were concentrated. Among the soldiers gathered here was Garland
H. White, a former Virginia slave who had escaped to Ohio before the
war and now returned as chaplain of the 28th United States Colored
Troops.

I marched at the head of the column, and soon I found myself called upon
by the officers and men of my regiment to make a speech, with which,
of course, I readily complied. A vast multitude assembled on Broad street,
and I was aroused amid the shouts of ten thousand voices, and proclaimed
for the first time in that city freedom to all mankind.

From behind the barred windows of Lumpkin’s Jail, the imprisoned slaves
began to chant:

Slavery chain done broke at last!

Broke at last! Broke at last!

Slavery chain done broke at last!

Gonna praise God till I die!

The crowd outside took up the chant, the soldiers opened the slave cells,
and the prisoners came pouring out, most of them shouting, some praising
God and "master Abe” for their deliverance. Chaplain White found himself
unable to continue with his speech. "I became so overcome with tears, that
I could not stand up under the pressure of such fulness of joy in my own
heart. I retired to gain strength.” Several hours later, he located his
mother, whom he had not seen for some twenty years . 5

The white residents bolted their doors, remained inside, and gained
their first impressions of Yankee occupation from behind the safety of their
shutters. "For us it was a requiem for buried hopes,” Sallie P. Putnam
conceded. The sudden and ignominious Confederate evacuation had been
equaled only by the humiliating sight of black soldiers patrolling the city
streets. For native whites, it was as though the victorious North had con-

170

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

spired to make the occupation as distasteful as possible. Few of them could
ever forget the long lines of black cavalry sweeping by the Exchange Hotel,
brandishing their swords and exchanging "savage cheers” with black resi¬
dents who were "exulting” over this dramatic moment in their lives. After
viewing such spectacles from her window, a young white woman wondered,
"Was it to this end we had fought and starved and gone naked and cold?
To this end that the wives and children of many dear and gallant friends
were husbandless and fatherless? To this end that our homes were in ruins,
our state devastated?” Understandably, then, local whites boycotted the
military band concerts on the Capitol grounds, even after Federal author¬
ities, in a conciliatory gesture, had barred blacks from attendance. 6

Four days after the entry of Union troops, Richmond blacks assembled
at the First African Church on Broad Street for a Jubilee Meeting. The
church, built in the form of a cross and scantily furnished, impressed a
northern visitor as "about the last place one would think of selecting for
getting up any particular enthusiasm on any other subject than religion.”
On this day, some 1,500 blacks, including a large number of soldiers,
packed the frail structure. With the singing of a hymn, beginning "Jesus
my all to heaven is gone,” the congregation gave expression to their newly
won freedom. After each line, they repeated with added emphasis, "I’m
going to join in this army; Fm going to join in this army of my Lord.” But
when they came to the verse commencing, "This is the way I long have
sought,” the voices reached even higher peaks and few of the blacks could
suppress the smiles that came across their faces. Meanwhile, in the Hall
of Delegates, where the Confederate Congress had only recently deliber¬
ated and where black soldiers now took turns swiveling in the Speaker’s
chair, T. Morris Chester, a black war correspondent, tried to assess the
impact of these first days of liberation: the rejoicing of the slaves and free
blacks, the tumultuous reception accorded President Lincoln when he vis¬
ited the city, the opening of the slave pens, and the mood of the black
population. "They declare that they cannot realize the change; though they
have long prayed for it, yet it seems impossible that it has come.” 7

It took little time for the "grapevine” to spread the news that Babylon
(as some blacks called it) had fallen. When black children attending a
freedmen’s school in Norfolk heard the news, they responded with a re¬
sounding chorus of "Glory Hallelujah.” Reaching the line "We’ll hang Jeff
Davis to a sour apple tree,” one of the pupils inquired if Davis had, indeed,
met that fate. The teacher told her that Davis was still very much alive.
At this news, the pupil expressed her dismay "by a decided pout of her lips,
such a pout as these children only are able to give.” Still, the news about
Richmond excited them. Most of the children revealed that they had rela¬
tives there whom they now hoped to see, several looked forward to reunions
with fathers and mothers "dat dem dere Secesh carried off,” and those
who had neither friends nor relatives in the city were "mighty glad” any¬
way because they understood the news to mean that "cullud people free
now.” 8

Slaves No More

171

When the news reached a plantation near Yorktown, the white family
broke into tears, not only over the fall of Richmond but over the rumor that
the Yankees had captured Jefferson Davis. Overhearing the conversation,
a black servant rushed through the preparation of the supper, asked an¬
other servant to wait on the table for her, and explained to the family that
she had to fetch water from the "bush-spring.” She walked slowly until no
one could see her and then ran the rest of the way. Upon reaching the
spring, she made certain she was alone and then gave full vent to her
feelings.

I jump up an’ scream, "Glory, glory, hallelujah to Jesus! Fs free! Fs free!
Glory to God, you come down an’ free us; no big man could do it.” An’

I got sort o’ scared, afeared somebody hear me, an’ I takes another good
look, an’ fall on de groun’, an’ roll over, an’ kiss de groun’ fo’ de Lord’s
sake, Fs so full o’ praise to Masser Jesus. He do all dis great work. De soul
buyers can neber take my two chillen lef me; no, neber can take ’em from
me no mo’.

Several years before, her husband and four children had been sold to a
slave dealer. Her thoughts now turned to the possibility of a reunion. 9

Only a few miles from the Appomattox Courthouse, Fannie Berry, a
house servant, stood in the yard with her mistress, Sarah Ann, and
watched the white flag being hoisted in the Pamplin village square. "Oh,
Lordy,” her mistress exclaimed, "Lee done surrendered!” Richmond had
fallen the previous week, but for Fannie Berry this was the day she would
remember the rest of her life.

Never was no time like ’em befo’ or since. Niggers shoutin’ an’ clappin’
hands an’ singin’! Chillun runnin’ all over de place beatin’ tins an’ yellin’.
Ev’ybody happy. Sho’ did some celebratin’. Run to de kitchen an’ shout
in de winder:

Mammy, don't you cook no mo'
You's free! You’s free!

Run to de henhouse an’ shout:

Rooster, don't you crow no mo'
You's free! You's free!

01' hen, don't you lay no mo' eggs,
You's free! You's free!

Go to de pigpen an’ tell de pig:

01'pig, don’t you grunt no mo'
You's free! You's free!

172

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Tell de cows:

Ol f cow, don't you give no mo 9 milk,

You's free! You’s free!

Meanwhile, she recalled, some "smart alec boys” sneaked up under her
mistress’s window and shouted, "Ain’t got to slave no mo’. We’s free! We’s
free!” The day after the celebration, however, Fannie Berry went about her
usual duties, as if she hadn’t understood the full implications of what had
transpired. And as before, she permitted her mistress to hire her out.
Finally, the woman for whom she was working told her she was now free,
there was no need to return to her mistress, and she could stay and work
for room and board. "I didn’t say nothin’ when she wuz tellin’ me, but done
’cided to leave her an’ go back to the white folks dat furst own me.” 10

Unlike many of their rural brethren, who evinced a certain confusion
about the implications of freedom and when to claim it, the blacks in
Richmond had little difficulty in appreciating the significance of this event.
And they could test it almost instantly. They promenaded on the hitherto
forbidden grounds of Capitol Square. They assembled in groups of five or
more without the presence or authorization of a white man. They sought
out new employers at better terms. They moved about as they pleased
without having to show a pass upon the demand of any white person.
"We-uns kin go jist anywhar,” one local black exulted, "don’t keer for no
pass—go when yer want’er. Golly! de kingdom hab kim dis time for sure
—dat ar what am promised in de generations to dem dat goes up tru great
tribulations.” And they immediately seized upon the opportunity to edu¬
cate themselves and their children, to separate their church from white
domination, and to form their own community institutions. 11

Less than two years after the fall ofRichmond, a Massachusetts clergy¬
man arrived in the city with the intention of establishing a school to train
black ministers. But when he sought a building for his school, he encoun¬
tered considerable resistance, until he met Mary Ann Lumpkin, the black
wife of the former slave dealer. She offered to lease him Lumpkin’s Jail.
With unconcealed enthusiasm, black workers knocked out the cells, re¬
moved the iron bars from the windows, and refashioned the old jail as a
school for ministers and freedmen alike. Before long, children and adults
entered the doors of the new school, some of them recalling that this was
not their first visit to the familiar brick building. 12

Despite the immediate gratification experienced by the black residents
of Richmond, the death of slavery proved to be agonizingly slow. That
precise moment when a slave could think of himself or herself as a free

Slaves No More

173

person was not always clear. From the very outset of the war, many slaves
assumed they were free the day the Yankees came into their vicinity. But
with the military situation subject to constant change, any freedom that
ultimately depended on the presence of Union troops was apt to be quite
precarious, and in some regions the slaves found themselves uncertain as
to whose authority prevailed. The Emancipation Proclamation, moreover,
excluded numbers of slaves from its provisions, some masters claimed to
be unaware of the emancipation order, and still others refused to acknowl¬
edge it while the war raged and doubted its constitutionality after the end
of hostilities. "I guess we musta celebrated ’Mancipation about twelve
times in Harnett County,” recalled Ambrose Douglass, a former North
Carolina slave. "Every time a bunch of No’thern sojers would come through
they would tell us we was free and we’d begin celebratin’. Before we would
get through somebody else would tell us to go back to work, and we would
go. Some of us wanted to jine up with the army, but didn’t know who was
goin’ to win and didn’t take no chances.” 13

Outside of a few urban centers, Union soldiers rarely remained long
enough in any one place to enforce the slave’s new status. Of the slaves in
her region "who supposed they were free,” a South Carolina white woman
noted how they were "gradually discovering a Yankee army passing
through the country and telling them they are free is not sufficient to make
it a fact.” Nor was the protection of the freedman’s status the first priority
of an army engaged in a life-and-death struggle. When the troops needed
to move on, many of the blacks were understandably dismayed, confused,
and frightened. "Christ A’mighty!” one slave exclaimed in late 1861 when
told the troops were about to depart. "If Massa Elliott Garrard catch me,
might as well be dead—he kill me, certain.” Even if Union officers assured
him of his safety, the slave had little reason to place any confidence in the
word of someone who would not be around on that inevitable day of reckon¬
ing. While encamped in the North Carolina countryside, the black regi¬
ment to which Henry M. Turner was attached had attracted nearly 700
slaves from the immediate vicinity. "To describe the scene produced by our
departure,” he wrote, "would be too solemn, if time and space permitted.
Suffice it to say, many were the tears shed, many sorrowful hearts bled....
God alone knows, I was compelled to evade their sight as much as possible,
to be relieved of such words as these, 'Chaplain, what shall I do? where can
we go? will you come back?’ ” 14

Widespread dismay at the impending departure of the Yankees re¬
flected not only the prevailing uncertainty about freedom but the very real
fear that their masters or the entire white community might wreak ven¬
geance on them for any irregular behavior during the brief period of occu¬
pation. In a Mississippi town near Vicksburg, a number of slaves had joined
with the Yankees to plunder stores and homes, apparently assuming that
the soldiers would be around to protect them. But now the troops were
moving on, leaving the looters with their newly acquired possessions and
all the slaves, regardless of what role they had played in the pillaging, at

174

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the mercy of whites who felt betrayed and robbed. With "undisguised
amazement,” the blacks watched the soldiers leave, and within hours one
of them caught up with the Yankee columns and reported that a number
of his people had already been killed. On a plantation near Columbia,
South Carolina, the master and mistress waited until the Yankees de¬
parted and then vented their anger on a young slave girl who had helped
the soldiers to locate the hidden silverware, money, and jewelry. "She’d
done wrong I know,” a former slave recalled, "but I hated to see her suffer
so awful for it. After de Yankees had gone, de missus and massa had de poor
gal hung ’till she die. It was something awful to see.” With similar swift¬
ness, a slaveholder who was reputedly "very good to his Negroes” became
so enraged over the behavior of a black that the moment the Yankees left
the area he strung him up to the beams of a shed. 15

Where slave misbehavior had been particularly "outrageous,” as in
northern Louisiana and the adjoining Mississippi counties, the Yankee
raiding parties had no sooner returned to their bases than local whites
demanded swift and severe retaliation. Not content to leave such matters
entirely in the hands of the planters, a newspaper in Alexandria urged that
public examples be made of "the ungrateful and vindictive scoundrels”
who seized their masters’ property, volunteered information to or acted as
guides for the enemy, and "were seen armed or participated in any active
demonstration.”

The uppermost thought in every one’s mind before the Yankee invasion
of our Parish was, what will be the conduct of the slaves. The most
important consideration for all of us now that the invasion has swept by,
is what conduct are we to pursue to them? ... Some offences have been
committed that cannot be atoned for but by death. Others may be safely
expiated by the lash or other corporeal punishment. Others may safely
be left to the milder discipline of the plantation. The punishment for each
proper to its kind, should be inexorably and unflinchingly afflicted.

The newspaper advised whites to scrutinize recent slave conduct and then
select a particularly "diabolical” offender for immediate and public punish¬
ment. "This will inspire wholesome terror. Its example will be long remem¬
bered.” Acknowledging the losses already suffered by some masters and the
fear of losing still more, the editor asked the planter class to place the
security of the entire white population above any pecuniary consider¬
ations: "Here and there the life of a slave forfeited by his crime will entail
a loss, but a great and good result will be attained, and those who are
instrumental in engraving a wholesome lesson on the minds of this impres¬
sionable population will have cause to be thankful hereafter for this sug¬
gestion.” 16

Requiring little prompting, some slaveholders had already acted in
this spirit. In Rapides Parish, which included the town of Alexandria, John
H. Ransdell moved very quickly to reassert his authority after the Yankees

Slaves No More

175

departed. 'Things are just now beginning to work right,” he informed his
absentee neighbor, Governor Thomas O. Moore. "The negroes hated aw¬
fully to go to work again. Several have been shot and probably more will
have to be.” Less than a month later, he concurred with the governor that
the recent Yankee raids had left him thoroughly disillusioned with the
blacks. Even when two of the governor's runaways returned, expressing
pleasure at having escaped from the Yankees, Ransdell doubted their story
and suspected "deep laid villany at the bottom of it.” In neighboring Missis¬
sippi, James Alcorn, a planter in Coahoma County, thought the recent
Union raids had "thoroughly demoralized” the slaves, rendering them "no
longer of any practical value to this vicinity.” Less than a month later, he
informed his wife: "Hadley, Anthony & Bill are very faithful, about ten
days since I whipped several in the field house including your filthy, lazy
Margaret; it helped them greatly.” 17

Nearly a year elapsed before the Union Army returned to these re¬
gions, and this time some of the slaves insisted that they be permitted to
accompany the soldiers rather than be left behind. Near Alexandria, an
elderly slave told a Union correspondent," "Oh, master! since you was here
last, we have had dreadful times.” Several other slaves who had gathered
around him corroborated his narration of a reign of terror.

We seen stars in the day time. They treated us dreadful bad. They beat
us, and they hung us, and starved us.... Why, the day after you left, they
jist had us all out in a row and told us they was going to shoot us, and
they did hang two of us; and Mr. Pierce, the overseer, knocked one with
a fence rail, and he died next day. Oh, Master! we seen stars in de day
time. And now we going with you, we go back no mo 1 ! 18

Even if such stories were exaggerated for northern consumption, the
fact remains that many slaves realistically perceived the degree to which
their "freedom” rested on a Yankee presence. Once the troops moved on,
despite the assurances of Union officers and regardless of how exemplary
black behavior might have been, the status and conditions of labor of the
slaves tended in many regions to revert back to what they had been,
sometimes with painful consequences for those who insisted upon asserting
their freedom or who were thought to have been "spoiled” by the Yankees.
"The negroes' freedom was brought to a close to-day,” a South Carolina
white woman reported with relief, noting that as soon as the Yankees
moved on, Confederate "scouts” assembled the slaves, told them the Union
soldiers had no right to free them, and advised them to return to their usual
tasks. Many former slaves recalled precisely that experience. "They tol' us
we were free,” an ex-North Carolina slave testified about the Yankees, but
the master "would get cruel to the slaves if they acted like they were free.”
Although recognizing that he was free, a former Alabama slave knew
better than to claim that freedom in the presence of his master. "Didn't do
to say you was free. When de war was over if a nigger say he was free, dey

176

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

shot him down. I didn’t say anythin’, but one day I run away.” After
Confederate troops briefly reoccupied severed parishes in southern Louisi¬
ana, James Walkinshaw, an overseer, quickly made it clear to the blacks
he supervised that the Yankee invasion had changed nothing. "Don’t con¬
tradict me,” he shouted at a slave who protested his order to work harder.
"I don’t allow anybody white or black to do that; if you contradict me again.
I’ll cut your heart out; the Yankees have spoiled you Niggers but I’ll be
even with you.” Apparently the verbal reprimand was not sufficient, for
the overseer terminated the incident by stabbing the "spoiled” slave in the
breast. 19

The racial tensions exacerbated by black behavior during the Yankee
invasion persisted long after the troops had moved elsewhere. With even
greater vigilance, slaveholders and local whites scrutinized the remaining
blacks, looking for any actions, words, or changes in their demeanor that
suggested Yankee influences. Eliza Evans, a former Alabama slave, could
recall quite vividly the day she first used the surname which a Yankee
soldier had persuaded her to assume. "Jest Liza,” she had told the soldier
when he asked for her name. "I ain’t got no other names.” After ascertain¬
ing that she worked for a John Mixon, the Yankee had told her, "You are
Liza Mixon. Next time anybody call you nigger you tell ’em dat you is a
Negro and your name is Miss Liza Mixon.” The idea appealed to the young
slave. "The more I thought of that the more I liked it and I made up my
mind to do jest what he told me to.” Several days later, after the Yankees
had withdrawn from the area, Eliza was tending the livestock when her
master approached. "What you doin’, nigger?” he demanded to know. "I
ain’t no nigger,” she replied. "I’se a Negro and I’m Miss Liza Mixon.”
Startled by her response and sensitive to any signs of post-Yankee inso¬
lence, the master picked up a switch and ran after her. "Law’, but I was
skeered!” she recalled. "I hadn’t never had no whipping so I ran fast as I
can to Grandma Grade.” She reached her grandmother about the same
time her master did. "Grade,” he charged, "dat little nigger sassed me.”
When Eliza explained what had happened, revealing the conversation with
the soldier, her grandmother dedded to mete out the punishment herself.
"Grandma Gracie took my dress and lift it over my head and pins my hands
inside, and Lawsie, how she whipped me and I dassent holler loud either.”
Still, as she recalled the inddent many years later, Eliza Evans suggested
that she had derived considerable self-pride from this initial assertion of
freedom. "I jest said dat to de wrong person,” she concluded. 20

What, then, was "freedom” and who was "free”? The fluctuating
moods of individual masters, unexpected changes in the military situation,
the constant movement of troops, and widespread doubts about the validity
and enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation were bound to have a
sobering effect on the slaves’ perceptions of their status and rights, leaving
many of them quite confused if not thoroughly disillusioned. The sheer
uncertainty of it all prompted blacks to weigh carefully their actions and
utterances, as they had earlier in the war, even in some instances to

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177

disclaim any desire to be free or to deny what the Yankees told them. "Sho’
it ain’t no truf in what dem Yankees wuz a-sayin’,” Martha Colquitt re¬
called her mother telling her, "and us went right on living just like us
always done ’til Marse Billie called us together and told us de war wuz over
and us wuz free to go whar us wanted to go, and us could charge wages for
our work.” 21

Only with "the surrender,” as they came to call it, did many slaves
begin to acknowledge the reality of emancipation. The fall of Richmond
and the collapse of the Confederacy broke the final links in the chain. With
freedom no longer hanging on every military skirmish, slaves who had
shrewdly or fearfully refrained from any outward display of emotion sud¬
denly felt free to release their feelings and to act on them. Ambrose Doug¬
lass, who claimed to have celebrated emancipation every time the Yankees
came into Harnett County, North Carolina, sensed that this time it was
different, and he proposed to make certain. "I was 21 when freedom finally
came, and that time I didn’t take no chances on ’em taking it back again.
I lit out for Florida.” The day the war ended, Prince Johnson recalled,
"wagon loads o’ people rode all th’ough de place a-tellin’ us ’bout bein’
free.” When the news reached Oconee, Georgia, Ed McCree found himself
so overcome that he refused to wait for his master to confirm the report of
Lee’s surrender: "I runned ’round dat place a-shoutin’ to de top of my
voice.” 22

In the major cities and towns, far more than in the countryside, the
post-Appomattox demonstrations resembled the Jubilees that would
become so firmly fixed in black and southern lore. If only for a few days or
hours, many of the rural slaves flocked to the nearest town, anxious to join
their urban brethren in the festivities and to celebrate their emancipation
away from the scrutiny of their masters and mistresses. When news of "the
surrender” reached Athens, Georgia, blacks sang and danced around a
hastily constructed liberty pole in the center of town. (White residents cut
it down during the night.) Although urban blacks had enjoyed a certain
degree of autonomy in the past, military occupation afforded them the first
real opportunity to express themselves openly and freely as a community,
unhampered by curfews, passes, and restrictions on assemblages. Even
before Appomattox, many of them made full use of such opportunities. 23

The largest and most spectacular demonstration took place in Charles¬
ton, less than a month after Union occupation. More than 4,000 black men
and women wound their way through the city streets, cheered on by some
10,000 spectators, most of them also black. With obvious emotions, they
responded to a mule-drawn cart in which two black women sat, while next
to them stood a mock slave auctioneer shouting, "How much am I offered?”
Behind the cart marched sixty men tied together as a slave gang, followed
in turn by a cart containing a black-draped coffin inscribed with the words
"Slavery is Dead.” Union soldiers, schoolchildren, firemen, and members
of various religious societies participated in the march along with an im¬
pressive number ofblack laborers whose occupations pointed up the impor-

178

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

tant role they played in the local economy—carpenters, butchers, tailors,
teamsters, masons, wheelwrights, barbers, coopers, bakers, blacksmiths,
wood sawyers, and painters. For the black community of Charleston, the
parade proved to be an impressive display of organization and self-pride.
The white residents thought less of it. "The innovation was by no means
pleasant,” a reporter wrote of the few white onlookers, "but they had sense
enough to keep their thoughts to themselves.” 24

Less than a week after the end of the war, still another celebration in
Charleston featured the ceremonial raising of the United States flag over
the ruins of Fort Sumter. Far more dramatic than any of the speeches on
this occasion was the presence of such individuals as William Lloyd Garri¬
son, the veteran northern abolitionist, for whom this must have been a
particularly satisfying day. Robert Smalls, the black war hero who had
delivered a Confederate steamer to the Union Navy, now used that samp
ship to convey some 3,000 blacks to Fort Sumter. On the quarterdeck stood
Major Martin R. Delany, who had once counseled emigration as the only
alternative to continued racial oppression and enslavement and who would
soon take his post as a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina. Next
to Delany stood another black man, the son of Denmark Vesey, who some
thirty-three years before had been executed for plotting a slave insurrec¬
tion in Charleston. 25

Nearly a week after the fall of Richmond, the Confederate dream lay
shattered. When the news reached Mary Darby, daughter of a prominent
South Carolina fa mi l y , she staggered to a table, sat down, and wept aloud.
"Now,” she shrieked, "we belong to Negroes and Yankees.” If the freed
slaves had reason to be confused about the future, their former masters and
mistresses were in many instances absolutely distraught, incapable of per¬
ceiving a future without slaves. "Nobody that hasn’t experienced it knows
anything about our suffering,” a young South Carolina planter declared.
"We are discouraged: we have nothing left to begin new with. I never did
a day’s work in my life, and don’t know how to begin.” Often with little
sense of intended irony, whites viewed the downfall of the Confederacy and
slavery as fastening upon them the ignominy of bondage. Either they must
submit to the insolence of their servants or appeal to their northern "mas¬
ters” for protection, one white woman wrote, "as if we were slaves our¬
selves—and that is just what they are trying to make of us. Oh, it is
abominable!” 25

Seeking "temporary relief” from the recent disasters, including the
loss of "many of our servants,” Eva B. Jones of Augusta, Georgia, immersed
herself in fourteen volumes of history. But she found little comfort in a
study of the past, only additional evidence of human depravity.

How vice and wickedness, injustice and every human passion runs riot,
flourishes, oftentimes going unpunished to the tomb! And how the little
feeble sickly attempts of virtue struggle, and after a brief while fade
away, unappreciated and unextolled! The depravity of the human heart

Slaves No More 179

is truly wonderful, and the moiety of virtue contained on the historic
page truly deplorable.

Jf she found any consolation in her readings, it was only to know how often
these same sorrows and unmerited punishments that we are now under¬
going [have] been visited upon the brave, the deserving, the heroic, and the
patient of all ages and in all climes!” Returning to the history that was
being acted out in her own household, she bemoaned the abolition of slav¬
ery as a most unprecedented robbery,” intended only for the "greater
humiliation of the southern people. "However, it is done,” she sighed;
"and we, the chained witnesses, can only look on.” 27

With such thoughts preying upon them, slave-owning famiw pre¬
pared to surrender their human property but not the ideology that had
mad.6 such possessions possible and necessary.

Whatever doubts persisted in the minds of slave owners about the status
of their blacks were largely resolved in the aftermath of the Confederate
collapse. On the day he heard of General Lee’s surrender, Thomas Dabney
a prominent Mississippi planter, rode out into his fields and informed the
slaves that they were free; at the same time, his daughter recalled, he
advised them "to work the crop as they had been doing” and he promised
to compensate them "as he thought just.” Not all masters acted with such
decisiveness, even after Appomattox. Only gradually, often belatedly, did
many of them concede freedom to their slaves, but not without considerable
self-torment, bitterness, and anxiety about the future. After Union troops
occupied Augusta, Georgia, some three weeks after Lee’s surrender, Jeffer-
son Thomas read the edict from the commanding officer and only then did
he feel compelled to call his slaves together to talk to them about the
probability of freedom. When David G. Harris, a South Carolina planter,
first heard about the emancipation edict in early June 1865, he said noth¬
ing to his slaves; not until mid-August, four months after the end of the
war, and only after Union troops stationed nearby ordered the planters to
inform their slaves, did most of them in his vicinity do so. 28

Although they had anticipated it for some time, many slaveholding
families still expressed incredulity when emancipation became a reality.
If they don t belong to me, whose are they?” one woman asked, clinging
to the certainty that black people had to belong to someone. To be deprived
of property some of them had worked hard to accumulate struck them with
particular dismay. I tell you it is mighty hard,” a dispossessed slave owner
averred, "for my pa paid his own money for our niggers; and that’s not all
they ve robbed us of. They have taken our horses and cattle and sheep and
every thing. ” Even when they faced up to the inevitable, some had no way

180

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

of knowing how to go about freeing their slaves. "This is more than I
anticipated,” the widowed mistress of a Georgia plantation wrote on May
17, 1865, "yet I trust it will be a gradual thing & not done all at once.”
Twelve days later, she remained undecided on how to proceed. "What I
shall do with mine is a question that troubles day & night. It is my last
thought at night & the first in the morning.” After finally telling them they
were free and promising to look after them, she wondered how she could
possibly survive without them. 29

The way to retain their slaves, some families determined, was to make
freedom a vague and frightening prospect. Not until nearly two months
after Union occupation and the end of the war did the Elmore family of
Columbia, South Carolina, "talk very freely” to their servants about "the
probability of freedom,” and then only to make clear to them that they
would find freedom "much harder than slavery.” Even as some of their
blacks were taking the initiative to claim their freedom, the Elmores
waited until the end of May to inform the remaining servants that they
were no longer slaves. In nearby Camden, Emm a Holmes heard that an
emancipation edict had been issued in Columbia, "but we have not yet seen
it, nor have any Yankees been here”; in the meantime, Emma and her
mother warned the servants that in the event of freedom they would have
to pay their own expenses. The uncertainty about emancipation did not
deter them from dismissing two servants for insubordination, nor did it
inhibit several of their slaves from leaving in mid-June without saying a
word to anyone. To retain Chloe, a valued servant and cook, they told her
that freedom for the blacks remained uncertain until Congress acted and
most likely "negroes [would] still [be] obliged to remain with their mas¬
ters.” They also pleaded with Chloe "not to sneak away at night as the
others had done, disgracing themselves by running away.” When the Yan¬
kees finally arrived, the commanding officer, as Emma Holmes understood
him, declared that the slaves were not yet free but "shall work and behave
properly, though on a different footing with their former masters.” Never¬
theless, Chloe left in late August, after giving two days’ notice, and Ann,
the laundress and a "poor deluded fool,” departed without even finishing
her ironing. 80

Henry W. Ravenel, the prominent South Carolinian who thought of
himself as a benevolent master, was typical of those who refused to rush
headlong into an acknowledgment of emancipation. "Many negroes in
Aiken,” he wrote in early May 1865, "hearing they were free in Augusta
have gone over to hear from the Yankees the truth. Some are returning
disappointed.... Most that we hear is mere rumor.” The Union officers
stationed nearby claimed to have received no instructions regarding eman¬
cipation. Thinking the issue still in doubt, Ravenel opted for delay. "My
negroes have made no change in their behaviour, & are going on as they
have always hitherto done. Until I know that they are legally free, I shall
let them continue.” After the local Union Army commander ordered that
the slaves be set free, Ravenel took the required oath of allegiance to the

Slaves No More

181

United States Constitution in late May and only then did he resolve his
doubts about emancipation. "It is the settled policy of the country/’ he
concluded. "I have today formally announced to my negroes the fact, &
made such arrangements with each as the new relation rendered neces-

”31

sary.

While slave-owning families determined how and whether to break the
news, the blacks themselves were not necessarily passive spectators. Most
often, they first heard about their freedom when the Yankee soldiers
passed through the vicinity. "We’s diggin’ potatoes,” a former Louisiana
and Texas slave recalled, "when de Yankees come up with two big wagons
and make us come out of de fields and free us. Dere wasn’t no cel’bration
’bout it. Massa say us can stay couple days till us ’cide what to do.” In the
cities and towns, the presence of Union troops both confirmed and helped
to enforce black freedom; many rural slaves, in fact, learned of their free¬
dom by accompanying their master to town on some errand. "No Negro is
improved by a visit to Columbia, & a visit to Charleston is his certain
destruction,” an up-country South Carolinian concluded, after he had ob¬
served the demoralizing effects of such a visit on a neighbor’s slave who
now talked wildly about making a "bargain” before working any more. 32

The same network of communications developed by slaves to keep
themselves informed of the war also helped to spread the news about
freedom to plantations and farms bypassed by the Yankees. The conversa¬
tions of the "white folks” remained a prime source of information, and
many body servants returning with their masters from the war front were
feted by their fellow slaves not only for their heroism but for the valuable
information they brought. "All de slaves crowded ’roun me an’ wanted to
know if dey wus gonna be freed or not an’ when I tol’ ’em dat de war wus
over an’ dat dey wus free dey wus all very glad.” Charlotte Brooks had been
sold at the age of seventeen to a hard-driving Texas planter. Working in
the house as a cook, she overheard a conversation about freedom, immedi¬
ately ran into the field to inform the other slaves, and they all quit work
together. Still another source of information was employers seeking to hire
black laborers. Taking advantage of the momentary absence of a master,
who had refused to tell his slaves they were free, two white men represent¬
ing a nearby mill informed Lizzie Hughes’s mother she was a free woman,
handed her "a piece of paper” to prove it, and offered to pay her twelve
dollars a month if she would cook for the mill hands. 33

Whatever the source, the news reached some slaves at a most oppor¬
tune time. During an altercation with her mistress, Annie Gregg, a Tennes¬
see slave, watched as she picked up a handful of switches with the intention
of meting out the usual punishment for insolence. "I picked up the pan of
boiling water to scald the chickens in. She got scared of me, told me to put
the pan down. I didn’t do it.” Quickly called to the scene, the master scolded
his wife rather than the slave, reminding her that the slaves were now "as
free as you are or I am.” To Annie Gregg, the intervention of her master,
whom she had always considered "cruel,” was only slightly less startling

182

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

than the news itself. "That is the first I ever heard about freedom,” she
recalled. The news of freedom had immediate significance, too, for the
Louisiana slaves hiding out in the cane brakes along the Mississippi River,
for the Texas mother who dreaded having to send her small child out into
the fields to work, for the North Carolina slave still wearing a ball and
chain after trying to run away (a Yankee officer had to take him to town
to cut it off), and for the many slaves who suddenly found themselves
released from slave pens and jails—among them, "Uncle Tom,” an Arkan¬
sas slave, "the best reader, white or black, for miles,” who had made the
mistaVp of reading a newspaper with the latest war news to a gathering of
blacks. And for a Tennessee slave who had been purchasing her freedom,
the news relieved her of the need to pay any more. "De rest ain’t paid yet,”
she said with a smile. "No, sah! leave dat to de judgment-day.” 34

While their "white folks” refused to confirm their freedom, numbers
of slaves continued to strike out on their own. The many blacks who flocked
to the Union camps or left with the Yankee soldiers had acted to determine
their own status, as did the slaves in Kentucky and Missouri and other
states and regions unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet de¬
spite examples of slave initiative, the habits and dependency learned as
slaves, as well as the need to survive, prompted many blacks to refrain from
any premature or hasty assertion of their freedom. If doubts persisted, both
reason and fear sustained those doubts. Even when the Yankees informed
thorn of freedom, they often accompanied the announcement with admoni¬
tions that left some blacks understandably confused. In explaining their
new status to them, a Union officer in Liberty County, Georgia, reportedly
warned the blacks "to stay at home and work harder than they had ever
done in their fives.” The soldiers, he added, were there to make certain
"that they behaved themselves.” A white resident who overheard the talk
observed, "They (the Nigs) were quite disgusted.” 35

The example of blacks who were beaten for claiming their freedom
prematurely tended to make the others cautious about how they acted and
what they said. Again, the temperaments of individual masters and mis¬
tresses varied considerably, particularly when they had to face still further
losses from a war that had already cost them dearly. While some tried to
deny or distort the news of freedom, others backed their denials with a
show of force. The master on a Tennessee plantation interpreted a slave’s
assertion of freedom as a display of insolence and slapped the woman across
the face—the first time he had ever laid hands on her. Only after a visit
to the nearby town did he reluctantly accept the fact of emancipation.
"Seemed like he couldn’t understand how freedom was to be,” one of his
former slaves recalled. No matter what they heard, however, some slave¬
owning families resisted the advent of freedom and used every wile and
device to postpone or deny it. "Ed,” a Georgia mistress inquired of a young
slave, "you suppose them Yankees would spill their blood to come down
here to free you niggers?” That question he could not answer, but "I’se free
anyhow,” he insisted. At that, the mistress dropped any further attempt

Slaves No More

183

to reason with him. "Shut up,” she ordered, or "I’ll mash your mouth.” Not
until midsummer 1865, and only after the arrival of Union troops, did she
acknowledge his freedom. 38

With the end of the war, Federal officials attempted in various ways
to impress upon slaves and masters that emancipation was now the law of
the land. That ran contrary, however, to the persistent belief in some
regions that slavery remained a legal institution until the new state legisla¬
tures and perhaps eventually the Supreme Court of the United States
resolved the question. By offering inducements to their blacks to remain
with them, some planters evidently hoped not only to complete the current
crops but to reap the benefits of court decisions which might invalidate the
Em a n cipation Proclamation. The only real question to be decided, accord¬
ing to the leading newspapers of Jackson, Mississippi, was whether or not
the state should adopt a system of gradual and compensated emancipation.
After visiting three counties in that state, a Union officer thought such
opinions "to be the views of the people generally” and that the prospects
for an early recognition of emancipation were quite dim. "Nowhere that I
have been do the people generally realize the fact that the negro is Free.” 37

Disturbed by the apparent resiliency of the "peculiar institution,” the
Freedmen’s Bureau, a new Federal agency designed to ease the slave’s
transition to freedom, undertook the task of publicizing and enforcing the
abolition of slavery. In late May 1865, Bureau officers warned that any
person employing freedmen who failed to compensate them for their labor
would be adjudged disloyal to the United States government and risked
having his or her property seized and divided among the freedmen. In
Louisiana, Bureau agents were asked to read the Emancipation Proclama¬
tion on every plantation within their jurisdiction and to leave copies (in
French and English) with the freedmen as well as the planters. At the same
time, Bureau officers in Mississippi distributed circulars to black preachers
and urged that meetings of freedmen be convened at which the Proclama¬
tion would be read and explained. 38

For numerous slaves, in fact, freedom came only when "de Guvment
man” made his rounds of the plantations and forced the planters to ac¬
knowledge emancipation. The mere threat of such visits and the rumors
that Union soldiers were patrolling the countryside in search of offenders
prompted a number of holdouts to free their slaves. The day she knew she
was a free woman, Sarah Ford recalled, a Union officer came onto the
plantation and read the Emancipation Proclamation to the assembled
slaves. "Dat one time Massa Charley can’t open he mouth, ’cause de cap¬
tain tell him to shut up, dat he’d do de talkin’.” On a Louisiana plantation,
"way after freedom,” the same scene was acted out, except that the plant¬
er’s wife emerged from the house after the officer left and told her newly
freed blacks: "Ten years from today I’ll have you all back ’gain.” Although
most masters no doubt resented the interference of Federal officers and
would have preferred to tell the slaves in their own time and way, Henry
W. Ravenel requested the presence of a Union officer in order to make clear

184

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

to his blacks that they were entitled to none of his land, they were expected
to remain at work, and they were free to serve him without fear of repris¬
als. (The rumor had circulated, allegedly the work of black troops, that
slaves found working for their previous owners would be shot.) The officer
happily obliged Ravenel, warning the newly freed slaves of "the trouble &
sufferings they would encounter if they left their homes.” 39

The old order died slowly, often with considerable resistance. In the
remote and relatively isolated interior counties and parishes where Yan¬
kee troops had rarely if ever been seen, the war had barely interrupted the
old routines and the patrollers made certain that the blacks remained on
the plantations. The news of emancipation, like much of the war news, had
been delayed and sometimes deliberately suppressed or distorted. "De Yan¬
kees never come into de 'dark comer,’ ” a black resident of Chester County,
South Carolina, recalled, and not until two years after the war did they
learn of their freedom—"then we all left.” In the up-country of North
Carolina, a freedman remarked several years after the war, "the whip is
a-goin’ and the horn a-blowin’ just as it used to be.” On some plantations,
the owners barred all visitors, locked their slaves in the yards at night, and
intimidated them with stories of how the Yankees intended to sell them to
defray the cost of the war. Traveling through the upper and interior sec¬
tions of Georgia in August 1865, James Lynch, a missionary for the African
Methodist Episcopal Church, found that "in some places the people do not
know really that they are free, and if they do, their surroundings are such
that they would fear to speak of it.” 40

Nowhere was the problem more persistent than in Texas, which had
been relatively untouched by the war. The slave population, however, had
swelled after many planters in neighboring states moved their chattel
there in the hope of avoiding both the Yankees and emancipation. Not until
June 19, 1865, more than two months after Appomattox, would black
freedom be acknowledged in Texas. "Dat a long year to wait, de las’ year
de war,” recalled Henry Lewis, who had been a slave in Jefferson County.
But even then, some planters clung to the notion that "niggers would never
be free in Texas” and acted in that belief. Wash Ingram, who had faithfully
toted water for Confederate soldiers during the war, claimed that his mas¬
ter did not free the more than three hundred slaves on the plantation until
at least a year after Lee’s surrender. Sometime around September, Susan
Merritt recalled, "a gov’ment man” came to the plantation in Rusk County
and demanded to know why the slaves had not yet been informed of their
freedom. The master replied that he had first wanted to complete the crop.
That day, the slaves were called out of the fields and told the news—"but
massa make us work sev’ral months after that. He say we git 20 acres land
and a mule but we didn’t git it.” What compounded the problem for the
slaves in Rusk County, Susan Merritt remembered, was that freedom had
been acknowledged several months earlier in neighboring counties. "Lots
of niggers was kilt after freedom, ’cause the slaves in Harrison County turn
loose right at freedom and them in Rusk County wasn’t. But they hears
’bout it and runs away to freedom in Harrison County and they owners

Slaves No More

185

have ’em bushwhacked, that shot down. You could see lots of niggers
bangin’ to trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom, ’cause they cotch ’em
swimmin’ ’cross Sabine River and shoot ’em.” 41

Even where the slaves realized they were free, some preferred to wait
until their masters had confirmed their new status. Hearing about freedom
from others, whether they be Yankees or even neighboring slaves, seemed
somehow less satisfying, perhaps less believable. Morris Sheppard, a for¬
mer Oklahoma slave, claimed to have learned about Lincoln the Emancipa¬
tor only from what his children were later taught in school. "I always think
of my old Master as de one dat freed me, and anyways Abraham Lincoln
and none of his North people didn’t look after me and buy my crop right
after I was free like old Master did. Dat was de time dat was de hardest and
everything was dark and confusion.” The number of blacks who responded
to questions about their freedom by declaring, "Mas’ Henry ain’t told
me so yit,” often infuriated postwar visitors to the South, as it did black
clergymen like James Lynch and Henry M. Turner who reproached their
people for the way they still cringed before their old masters and mis¬
tresses. Near Lexington, North Carolina, a northern correspondent en¬
countered a seventy-year-old black ferryman who had outlived seven
masters and who for forty-three years had conveyed passengers across the
Yadkin River. Although freedom had been declared in this region, he had
not yet severed his ties with the woman who owned him.

"Well, old man, you’re free now.”

"I dunno, master. They say all the colored people’s free; they do say
it certain; but I’m a-goin on same as I alius has been.”

"Why, you get wages now, don’t you?”

"No, sir; my mistress never said anything to me that I was to have
wages, nor yet that I was free; nor I never said anything to her. Ye see
I left it to her honor to talk to me about it, because I was afraid she’d say
I was insultin’ to her and presumin’, so I wouldn’t speak first. She ha’n’t
spoke yet.”

Bewildered by these responses, the reporter finally asked him if he in¬
tended to work on "just the same” until he died. At this point the loyal
slave made it clear that although good manners and a sense of mutual
obligations had kept him from asserting his freedom, he was quite prepared
to impose deadlines on his patience.

"Ye see, master, I am ashamed to say anything to her. But I don’t
’low to work any longer than to Christmas [1865], and then I’ll ask for
wages. But I want to leave the ferry. I’m a mighty good farmer, and I’ll
get a piece of ground and a chunk of a hoss, if I can, and work for
myself.” 42

The number of slaves who waited for the master to confirm their
freedom, rather than assert it independently, is not altogether surprising.
Whether the enslaved worker had labored on a plantation or a farm, he had

186

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

been brought up to view his master as the primary source of authority
the provider and the protector, the lawmaker and the enforcer, the judge
and the jury, and most masters had deliberately cultivated feelings of
dependency and helplessness in their slaves. No edict of emancipation
could immediately obliterate the habits of obedience and deference with
which many slaves had been inculcated since childhood. Nor could it in
some instances destroy a familiar relationship worked out over a period of
time, involving mutual obligations of service, sustenance, and protection.
The defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery no doubt weak¬
ened the master’s stature in the eyes of many slaves. But it did not neces¬
sarily lessen the respect, fear, and obedience he commanded by virtue of
his authority and economic power. "A lot o’ de niggers knowed nothin’ ’cept
what missus and marster tole us,” a former Georgia slave observed. "What
dey said wus just de same as de Lawd had spoken to us.” And in this
instance, he told them that Lincoln was dead, they were still slaves, and
he would distribute black cloth so they could mourn both Lincoln and their
freedom. 43

But there were sharply contrasting stories, too, which revealed the
compelling need some slaves felt to confront their masters and mistresses
with the truth about freedom, if for no other reason than to remove the last
doubts and to observe their reactions. Hired out to another family during
the war, a Virginia slave had been working in the fields when a friend
informed her that she was now free. "Is dat so?” she exclaimed. Dropping
her hoe, she ran the seven miles to her old place, found her mistress,
"looked at her real hard,” and then shouted, "I’se free! Yes, I’se free! Ain’t
got to work fo’ you no mo’. You can’t put me in yo’ pocket now!” Her
mistress broke into tears and ran into the house. That was all the slave
needed to see. The momentary doubt at hearing the news had been re¬
solved, and for the first time she could begin to think of herself as a free
woman. 44

The legends that grew out of emancipation would assume a special
place in the folk history of Afro-Americans. Like their white owners, they
retained strong, often emotionally charged memories of this critical mo¬
ment in their lives. In the interviews with former slaves conducted more
than seventy years later, no event would stand out with greater clarity in
their minds than the day they heard of their freedom. Even as many of the
slave descendants moved into the urban North in the next century, the
stories of emancipation would follow them. That was how Kathryn L.
Morgan came to learn of her great-grandmother Caddy, a strong-willed and
defiant slave who had been sold many times in her life but never ceased
to torment her owners. Of the many tales about this remarkable woman,
the one that became the favorite among her children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren was Rjxmt the day she learned of her freedom.

Caddy had been sold to a man in Goodman, Mississippi. It was terrible
to be sold in Mississippi. In fact, it was terrible to be sold anywhere. She

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had been put to work in the fields for running away again. She was hoeing
a crop when she heard that General Lee had surrendered. Do you know
who General Lee was? He was the man who was workihg for the South
in the Civil War. When General Lee surrendered that meant that all the
colored people were free! Caddy threw down that hoe, she marched her¬
self up to the big house, then, she looked around and found the mistress.
She went over to the mistress, she flipped up her dress and told the white
woman to do something. She said it mean and ugly. This is what she said:
Kiss my ass/ 45

Although the time and manner varied from place to place, the majority
of masters eventually got around to informing their slaves that emancipa¬
tion had become the law of the land. Occasionally, they did so under the
compulsion of a Federal order, upon the visitation of a Freedmen’s Bureau
officer, or at the demand of their own slaves. Usually, the master himself
decided how and when to make the announcement. When he sent out the
word for his slaves to assemble the next day, nearly everyone knew what
to expect. "There was little, if any, sleep that night,” Booker T. Washington
recalled. "All was excitement and expectancy.” Except perhaps for the
coming of the Yankees, it was like no other day in their lives. Outside the
Big House, the master waited for them on the front porch, often with his
entire family standing beside him. To the very end, he would invariably act
the role of the patrician, even as he presided over the dispersion of his flock
and the sundering of traditional and even intimate ties. Observing how
their master "couldn’t help but cry” or "couldn’t hardly talk,” some former
slaves confessed to having felt a certain compassion for him at this mo¬
ment, putting the best possible face on his previous treatment of them. "We
couldn’t help thinking about what a good marster he always had been,” a
former Georgia slave recalled, "and how old, and feeble, and gray headed
he looked as he kept on a-talkin’ that day.” Such sentiments were not
shared by all slaves, not even on the same plantation, and each black had
a different way of recollecting a master’s or mistress’s tears at the moment
of emancipation. "Missy, she cries and cries, and tells us we is free,” a
former Louisiana slave recalled, "and she hopes we starve to death and
she’d be glad, ’cause it ruin her to lose us.” 4a

Once the slaves had been assembled for the master’s announcement,
most of them stood quietly and anxiously, waiting to hear how he would
choose to tell them of their freedom. Some of them remained apprehensive,
recalling that the only previous occasion for such a gathering had been to
tell them they had been sold. Before his master could say a word, Robert
Falls remembered questioning him in a mocking manner, "Old Marster,
what you got to tell us?” His mother quickly warned him that he would be

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whipped but the slave owner decided instead to use the outburst to make
his point. As Falls recalled his words:

No I wont whip you. Never no more. Sit down thar all of you and listen
to what I got to tell you. I hates to do it but I must. You all aint my niggers
no more. You is free. Just as free as I am. Here I have raised you all to
work for me, and now you are going to leave me. I am an old man, and
I cant get along without you. I dont know what I am going to do.

In less than ten months, he was dead. "Well, sir,” Falls explained, "it killed
him.” 47

What the slaves recalled most vividly, "jes like it yestiddy,” was the
manner in which the master recognized their freedom, both his words and
temperament at that moment. The way he imparted the information re¬
vealed much about his state of mind, the kind of relationship he thought
he enjoyed with his slaves, and how he viewed the future. He first read to
them some official-looking paper setting forth the details of emancipation.
It might have been the Emancipation Proclamation itself or a recent Fed¬
eral circular; in any event, the language was cold, detached, bureaucratic,
and often incomprehensible. After the formal reading, Silas Smith of South
Carolina remembered, "us still sets, kaise no writing never aggrevated us
niggers way back dar.” Since such a moment called for absolute clarity,
most masters obliged with their own explanation, and those were the words
the slaves had waited to hear. "We didn’t quite understand what it was all
about,” a former Missouri field hand recalled, "until he informed us that
it meant we were slaves no longer, that we were free to go as we liked, to
work for anyone who would hire us and be responsible to no one but
ourselves.” As if to underscore the significance of his remarks, and perhaps
in some instances to commemorate the slave’s graduation to a different
status, some masters ceremonially presented to each of them "de age state¬
ment,” which included his or her name, place ofbirth, and approximate age
or date ofbirth. "Fs 16 year when surrender come,” Sam Jones Washington
told an interviewer many years later. "I knows dat, ’cause of massa’s
statement. All us niggers gits de statement when surrender come.” 48

To free his blacks was not to surrender the convictions with which he
had held them as slaves. In explaining to them the circumstances that now
made freedom necessary, most masters made it abundantly clear that their
actions did not flow from some long-repressed humanitarian urge. "We
went to the war and fought,” a Texas planter declared, "but the Yankees
done whup us, and they say the niggers is free.” That was the typical
explanation, as most ex-slaves recalled it: they were now free " ’cause de
gov’ment say you is free” or " ’cause the damned Yankees done ’creed you
are.” If some slaves had felt that only "massa” could free them, many
masters insisted that the Yankees had set them free. That they chose to
view emancipation in these terms was perfectly consistent with their own
self-image. "I have seen slavery in every Southern State,” a prominent

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Virginian concluded in June 1865, "and I am convinced that for the slave
it is the best condition in every way that has been devised.” The "tens of
thousands” of old men, women, and children he expected would now starve
for lack of support only made him that much more certain. "A Farmer now
has to pay his hands and he will keep none but such as will work well,
women with families and old men are not worth their food and they are
being turned adrift by the thousands.” As many masters viewed this mo¬
ment, then, if they had acted from humanitarian considerations, they
would have retained slavery, because of the protection and sustenance it
afforded a people incapable of caring for themselves. 49

If slaveholders felt morally reprehensible or guilt-ridden, they evinced
no indication of it at the moment they declared their blacks to be free.
Nothing in the postwar behavior and attitudes of these people suggested
that the ownership of slaves had necessarily compromised their values or
tortured their consciences. Nor was there any reason to suspect hypocrisy
or self-deception in the "strong conviction” of Henry W. Ravenel, for exam¬
ple, "that the old relation of master & slave, had received the divine sanc¬
tion & was the best condition in which the two races could live together for
mutual benefit.” Any detectable twinges of conscience in the slaveholding
class largely stemmed from the realization that some had abused the insti¬
tution. But like any northern employer, the master maintained that the
excesses of the few should not be permitted to question or undermine the
system itself. Nor were most of them intent on foisting the responsibility
for bondage on the New Englanders who had initially supplied them. After
all, a New Orleans newspaper observed several years after the war, the
transplantation from Africa to North America had "humanized” the Ne¬
gro, regenerating him in body, mind, and morals. Rather than confess any
misgivings about their slaveholding past, most masters at this moment
viewed themselves as decent men, good Christians who had performed a
useful, necessary, and benevolent task, fulfilling an obligation to an infe¬
rior people which more than compensated for the labor they had received
in return. There was nothing for which they needed to apologize. As George
A. Trenholm proudly told the Chamber of Commerce of Augusta, Georgia,
in early 1866, "Sir, we have educated them. We took them barbarians, we
returned them Christianized and civilized to those from whom we received
them; we paid for them, we return them without compensation. Our con¬
sciences are clear, our hands are clean.” 50

If any slave owner felt the need to reassure himself, he might use the
occasion of emancipation to remind the assembled blacks how well they
had fared under his tutelage. After making precisely that point, a Texas
planter who had moved his slaves there from Virginia during the war
asked them if he had ever treated anyone meanly. Every one of the slaves,
Liza Smith recalled, shouted, "No, sir!” and that brought a smile to their
master’s face. Equally confident of his image, Isaiah Day, known to his
slaves as "Papa Day” because he never liked the title of master, read the
official proclamation and then told them, as one of his slaves recalled: "De

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

gov’ment don’t need to tell you you is free, ’cause you been free all you days.
If you wants to stay you can and if you wants to go, you can. But if you go,
lots of white folks ain’t gwine treat you like I does.” With slightly less
confidence, a Georgia planter, proud of the behavior of his slaves during the
Yankee occupation, confessed to them, as he freed them, that he had never
realized the extent of their love for him. "He told us he had done tried to
be good to us and had done de best he could for us,” one of his former slaves
recalled. John Bonner, an Alabama planter, after reminding his slaves how
well he had provided for them, simply warned any who now chose to leave
that they would "jes’ have to root, pig, or die .” 51

To im press his freed slaves with the bounties and security they had
enjoyed was less designed to assuage any feelings of guilt than to entice
them to remain with him. That prime consideration elicited many a per¬
sonal note in the master’s announcement of freedom. With tears in his
eyes, his head bowed, and his hands clasped behind his back, the Reverend
Robert Turner, a preacher, farmer, and storekeeper, told his newly freed
slaves how much he admired each of them, appreciated their faithfulness,
and hated to lose them. The appeal had no apparent effect, as nearly every
one of his blacks left him. To remind their slaves of the "good life ” they had
provided them, some masters chose to celebrate emancipation with a boun¬
tiful feast or party. On a plantation in Harnett County, North Carolina,
Taylor Hugh McLean called his slaves out of the fields, met them at the
gate, told them they were free, and invited them to eat dinner. It proved
to be a feast few of them could forget.

He had five women cooking. He told them all he did not want them to
leave, but if they were going they must eat before they left. He said he
wanted everybody to eat all he wanted, and I remember the ham, eggs,
chicken, and other good things we had at that dinner. Then after the
dinner he spoke to all of us and said, "You have nowhere to go, nothin’
to live on, but go out on my other plantation and build you some shacks.”

With similar generosity, John Thomas Boykin, a substantial Georgia
planter, turned emancipation into "a big day,” killed several hogs for the
occasion, rolled out barrels of whiskey, and invited his freed slaves to enjoy
themselves and consider his proposal to stay with him and work for pay . 52
Whether or not a master consciously used such festivities to seduce his
newly freed work force, none of those ex-slaves who recalled them claimed
it influenced their decision to stay on or leave.

Few slave owners, in any case, thought it necessary or desirable to
accompany the announcement of freedom with a lavish entertainment.
Maintaining the posture of the protective father, addressing his "children”
who might soon experience the cruel and inhospitable world outside the
plantation, many masters preferred to use this solemn occasion to offer
advice and moral instruction. This was "no time for happiness,” a Missis¬
sippi planter told his former slaves, for they had no experience with free-

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191

dom. Albert Hill, who had been a slave in Georgia, recalled how his master
tried to explain to them on this day the difference between freedom ("hus¬
tlin’ for ourselves”) and slavery ("dependin’ on someone else”). Even as the
master stressed the problems his slaves were liable to confront as freedmen
and freedwomen, he seldom suggested, at least not in their presence, that
he may have been negligent in preparing them to assume the responsibili¬
ties of freedom. Rather, he reminded his blacks how he had raised them to
be honest, to work diligently, and to lead moral and Christian lives. But at
the same time, and without perceiving any contradiction, he usually urged
them to remain on the plantation until, as one former slave recalled, "dey
git de foothold and larn how to do”—that is, until they learned how to take
care of themselves . 53

The least any gentleman planter could do at this time was to invite his
"people” to stay with him and continue to share in the comforts, suste¬
nance, and protection the old "home” supposedly afforded them. He acted,
in other words, to preserve his source of labor in the guise of protecting his
former slaves from the inevitable hardships and snares of freedom. Claim¬
ing a responsibility toward them as dependents, which emancipation
should in no way compromise, some masters tried to ease the "burden” of
freedom on the older slaves and the children. "Old Amelia & her two
grandchildren,” Henry W. Ravenel wrote, "I will spare the mockery of
offering freedom to. I must support them as long as I have any thing to
give.” Whether from a sense of paternal obligation or to exploit their labor,
some masters insisted that the children remain with them until they
reached the age of twenty-one, and the apprenticeship laws usually permit¬
ted them to do so if the parents were missing or unable to support the
children. Silas Dothrum, a former Arkansas slave who could not recall ever
seeing his parents, was about ten years old when freedom came: "They kept
me in bondage and a girl that used to be with them. We were bound to them
that we would have to stay with them. They kept me just the same as under
bondage. I wasn’t allowed no kind of say-so.” In some instances, the attempt
to retain the children amounted to little less than kidnapping, with the
masters resisting the efforts of parents to claim them. Millie Randall, a
former Louisiana slave, recalled how her master "takes me and my
brother, Benny, in de wagon and druv us round and round so dey couldn’t
find us.” Finally, their mother induced the justice of the peace to intervene
on her behalf . 54

Although a confusion of values often marked their efforts, many slave¬
holders perceived the need to accommodate their old views and moral
justifications to the reality of freed blacks. Few planters embodied the
paternal ideal more faithfully in this moment of transition than Myrta
Lockett Avary’s father, a Virginia slaveholder. His daughter’s recollection
of the day freedom came to the plantation testified quite vividly to what
the South wanted so desperately to believe—the enduring strength and
viability of the traditional ties that had bound the white family and their
blacks. Although the Yankees had already told the slaves they were free,

192

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

they waited to hear the master make it so. On the night of the announce¬
ment, Myrta Avary recalled, the slaves assembled in the back yard, many
of them holding pine torches. On the porch of the Big House stood her
father, next to a table on which a candle had been placed. Looking out at
a "sea of uplifted black faces,” all of them now fastened on him, the planter
first read from a formal document, presumably the Emancipation Procla¬
mation, after which he spoke to them in a trembling voice.

You do not belong to me any more. You are free. You have been like my
own children. I have never felt that you were slaves. I have felt that you
were charges put into my hands by God and that I had to render account
to Him of how I raised you, how I treated you. I want you all to do well.

You will have to work, if not for me, for somebody else. Heretofore, you
have worked for me and I have supported you, fed you, clothed you, given
you comfortable homes, paid your doctors’ bills, bought your medicines,
taken care of your babies before they could take care of themselves; when
you were sick, your mistress and I have nursed you; we have laid your
dead away. I don’t think anybody else can have the same feeling for you
that she and I have. I have been trying to think out a plan for paying
wages or a part of the crop that would suit us all; but I haven’t finished
t hink i n g it out. I want to know what you think. Now, you can stay just
as you have been staying and work just as you have been working, and
we will plan together what is best. Or, you can go. My crops must be
worked, and I want to know what arrangements to make. Ben! Dick!
Moses! Abram! line up, everybody out there. As you pass this porch, tell
me if you mean to stay; you needn’t promise for longer than this year,
you know. If you want to go somewhere else, say so—and no hard
thoughts!

After their master completed his talk, the blacks, who had "listened
silently,” passed before him, each one of them indicating that he intended
to remain. Uncle Andrew, the black patriarch on this plantation, no doubt
spoke the sentiments of most of them when he explained his decision:
"Law, Marster! I ain’ got nowhar tuh go ef I was gwine!” The next morning,
the freedmen went about their regular duties, except for Uncle Eph, who
was nowhere to be found. Several days later, he returned, a disillusioned
man and "the butt of the quarters for many a day.” On this Virginia
plantation, the transition from slavery to freedom had been completed.

It was the perfect picture, embodying the notions of white nobility,
black humility, mutual obligations, faithful service, and the extended fam¬
ily unit—black and white. The slaves had reacted precisely as any "grate-
ful” and properly trained people would have been expected to react. And
Uncle Eph had discovered for all of them the advantages of the old home
compared to the uncertainty and insecurity that lay outside. "I jes wanter
see whut it feel lak tuh be free,” he explained after his brief sojourn, "an’

I wanter to go back to Ole Marster’s plantation whar I was born. It don’
look de same dar, an* I done see nuff uh freedom .” 55

Slaves No More

193

If every planter could have been reasonably confident of this kind of
scenario, the anxieties and fears which gripped so many of them in the

aftermath of emancipation might have been avoided. But that was not to
be. Neither the dispossessed slaveholders nor their newly freed slaves were
always willing or able to play the roles expected of them.

No matter how easily the old paternalism might adapt itself to new
realities, the death of slavery remained difficult to accept. The slave¬
owning class had always included in its ranks men and women of varying
degrees of temperament and mental stability, with the vast majority fall¬
ing somewhere between the legendary gentlemen and sadists. Understand¬
ably, wartime tensions, privations, and personal tragedies had taken their
toll and left many white families shattered, bitter, angry, and betrayed.
Now, in addition to the other calamities which had been visited upon them,
they faced the loss of their slave property and perhaps their labor force.
That proved to be more grief than some masters and mistresses were
capable of handling. After acknowledging their freedom, "Big Jim”
McClain, a Virginia planter, asked his more than one hundred slaves to
continue to work for him. None of them expressed a willingness to remain,
not even to harvest the current crops. At this affront, the pent-up bitterness
in McClain suddenly exploded. Seizing his pistol, he fired wildly into a
crowd of terrorized blacks, killing some outright and wounding others.
When finally restrained, McClain tried to take his own life. At this point,
several blacks promised to stay for another year and that seemed to placate
him. But Union troops would have to intervene before he would permit any
of his former slaves to leave the plantation . 56

Although few of their masters reacted as violently, newly freed slaves
had little way of knowing what to expect. The violent outburst of a
McClain, based on his record as a slaveholder, probably surprised none of
his blacks. But Matt Gaud, on the other hand, had treated his three slave
families like they were members of his own family. At least, that was how
Anderson Edwards remembered him. "The other niggers called us Major
Gaud’s free niggers.” Gaud had no sooner heard of emancipation, however,
than he began to curse his blacks vigorously, proclaiming that the Al¬
mighty had never intended such a thing as "free niggers.” And, as Edwards
recalled, his master "cussed till he died.” Having endured a hard bondage,
which included being sold six times, Jane Simpson expected no help from
her last owners—a temperamental mistress and alcoholic master. Antici¬
pating no change in their attitudes, she learned soon after emancipation
how accurately she had assessed their character. Like most of the slave¬
holding families in the neighborhood, she recalled, "dey was so mad ’cause
dey had to set ’em free, dey just stayed mean as dey would ’low ’em to be

194

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

anyhow, and is yet most of ’em.” Not surprisingly, the plantation mis ,
tresses, many of whom suddenly faced the unpleasant prospect of doing the
cooking and housework themselves, often reacted with even greater resent¬
ment than their husbands, belying what may have been left of their reputa¬
tion as the benevolent half of the household. Although the master "took it
well,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, the mistress (who had lost
two sons in the war) "just cussed us and said, 'Damn you, you are free
now.’ ” At the same time, the mistress of a Georgia plantation, where some
two hundred slaves had resided, gave every indication of losing her mind
after her husband acknowledged the emancipation decree. "I ’members
how she couldn’t stay in the house,” Emma Hurley remarked, "she jest
walked up an’ down out in the yard a-carrin’-on, talkin’ an’ a-ravin ’.” 57

To believe the testimony of former slaves, some of their masters and
mistresses never did recover from emancipation but died shortly after¬
wards from "heartbreak” and grief. "Miss Polly died right sifter the surren¬
der,” a former Virginia slave recalled. "She was so hurt that all the negroes
was going to be free. She died hollering 'Yankee!’ She was so mad that she
just died.” Similarly, Isaac Martin, who had been a slave in Texas, remem¬
bered that his master "didn’ live long atter dey tek his slaves ’way from
him. Well, it jis’ kill him, dat’s all.” In these instances, as in many others,
it remains unclear whether the "heartbreak” was induced by the loss of
slaves with whom the white owners thought they had intimate ties, the loss
of property and suddenly dim economic prospects, or the fears engendered
by the thought of four million free blacks. More than likely, the grief
stemmed largely from a sense that the world as they had known it was
collapsing all around them. Nevertheless, whatever the actual cause of
death, the former slaves had their own ideas. Within ten or fifteen days
after his freed slaves began to leave him, "Massa” Harry Hogan was dead,
and one black he had owned attributed it to "all de trouble cornin’ on him
at once.” Within three weeks after the slaves on an Arkansas plantation
heard they were free, they buried their mistress. "The news killed her
dead,” one of them recalled. And when "Marster” Billy Finnely returned
from the war (his brother had been killed in action), only to find the slaves
freed and most of them leaving the plantation, he seemed unable to cope
with reality; his mother found him one day in a shed, his throat slashe d ,
and beside him the razor and a note which revealed that he did not care
to live " ’cause de nigger free .” 58

To attribute the deaths of masters or mistresses to grief over the loss
of their slaves poses obvious difficulties, despite the exactitude with which
some blacks were able to pinpoint the occurrence. Still, the reported in¬
stances of this kind in the recollections of former bondsmen occur too
frequently to dismiss them altogether as flights of fantasy or faulty mem¬
ory. What remains crucial is that so many ex-slaves chose to recall the
death of a master or mistress in this way, as if to suggest that their "white
folks” had been so dependent on them that they were unable to conceive
of a future without them. "Old Mistress never git well after she lose all her

Slaves No More

195

niggers,” Katie Rowe recalled, "and one day de white boss [the overseer]
tell us she jest drap over dead setting in her chair, and we know her heart
jest broke.” Such testimony differed in no significant respect from how
Duncan Clinch Heyward remembered the death of his grandfather, who
had been one of the largest rice planters in South Carolina.

As my grandfather sat on the piazza of his house at the Wateree, his
former slaves stopped on their way to the station to bid him goodbye. All
they said was that they were going home, and would look for him soon.

He never returned to Combahee and did not see them again. Broken in
health and staggered by his losses, Charles Heyward could not recover
under the final blow. The emancipated slave could look forward to a
better day for himself and his descendants, but the old slaveholder’s day
was done. He soon went to his grave and his traditions and his troubles
were buried with him : 59

Although dismay and anxiety over emancipation were hardly uncom¬
mon, not all slaveholders shared these fashionable ailments in the same
degree and only a very few permitted the shock to drive them to suicide or
a premature death. Several months after Appomattox, Josiah Gorgas, the
former Confederate chief of ordnance, discussed recent events with a
wealthy Alabama planter and found him very much troubled, both about
himself and about the future of the white race in the South. Now that his
slaves had been freed, he seemed to think that his entire life had been
"wasted.” "This state of mind is natural, and leads to despondency in his
case,” Gorgas confided to his journal after the conversation, "but not so in
the case of most planters.” In his recent travels, Gorgas had been generally
pleased by the conduct of the planter class, particularly their equanimity
in the face of disaster. Here were Yankee officers coming onto their planta¬
tions, meeting and talking with the slaves, telling them they were free and
promising to protect their new rights, while the former masters made no
protest but avidly questioned the officers about their new relations with the
blacks. It all seemed like "a gigantic dream.” Four months ago, Gorgas
reflected, "that Yankee Captain attempting to make such an address to
their slaves, would have been hung on the nearest tree, and left there .” 60

But the readiness with which Gorgas perceived the planters adapting
themselves to the new conditions could manifest itself in many different
ways, not all of them consistent with the image this class had long tried
to cultivate. As slaveholders, many of them had preferred to view the
"peculiar institution” as an obligation and a burden, binding them to feed,
clothe, and protect the blacks in return for their labor and obedience. The
plantation mistress who in a moment of exasperation screamed, "It is the
slaves who own me,” gave perfect expression to that sense of burden. The
slaveholding class had always taken considerable pride in its treatment of
elderly slaves, contrasting such benevolence with the crassness of northern
employers who cared neither for the aged nor the sick but turned workers

196

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

onto the streets when they ceased to be productive. Actually, few slaves
lived long enough to constitute a burden on their owners, and even the aged
slaves often performed tasks that defrayed the cost of their upkeep. When
his grandmother was no longer able to work, Frederick Douglass recalled,
her owners manifested their gratitude for her many years of service by
removing her to the woods, where they "built her a little hut, put up a little
mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting
herself there in perfect loneliness.” Whatever the quality of care owners
had bestowed on their elderly slaves, emancipation, as some viewed it,
absolved them of any further responsibility. If the blacks were no longer
his slaves, the master might feel neither the compassion, the gentlemanly
compulsions, nor the economic need to provide them with the same degree
of protection, sympathy, and support. None expressed it more graphically
than the Georgia planter who burned the slave cabins to the ground and
expelled the occupants from the plantation. Nor did Will Davison, a Texas
planter, refrain from making himself clear on the day he freed his slaves.
"Well, you black sons-of-bitches, you are just as free as I am,” he declared,
and he promised to horsewhip any of them he found on the place the next
morning . 61

Upon freeing their slaves, the expressions of relief voiced by some
white families drowned out or blended indistinctly with the painful cries
of betrayal and ingratitude. But this reaction reflected not so much a sense
of guilt as a welcome respite from the vexations of managing troublesome
blacks, as if they—the slave owners—had been emancipated. "I was glad
and thankful—on my own account—when slavery ended and I ceased to
belong, body and soul, to my negroes,” a Virginia woman declared. With
a fine ironic twist, many a master and mistress thus managed to turn the
trauma and financial loss of black freedom into deliverance from the chains
that had bound them to their black folk. Cornelia Spencer, a prominent
resident of Chapel Hill and a future educator, hailed emancipation for the
benefits it would bestow upon all whites; slavery, she insisted, had been "an
awful drag” on the proper development of the South. "And because I love
the white man better than I do the black, I am glad they are free.” Nor
could she help but add, "And now I wish they were all in—shall I say
Massachusetts?—or Connecticut? Poor things! We are doing what we can
for them.” The equally high-minded Henry A. Wise, whose popularity in
Virginia remained undiminished, told a meeting in Alexandria more than
a year after the war that he praised God daily for having delivered him
from the "negrodom and niggerdom” of slavery. But he claimed to feel
some compassion for the real victim. "He is now a freedman but without
a friend. But he is a freedman. I am now free of responsibility for his care
and comfort, and, I repeat I am content.” The expressions of relief tended
to grow more vociferous as they became purely self-serving, designed only
to cover a family’s losses and to compensate shattered egos for the black
betrayals. "I lost sixteen niggers,” a Charleston resident remarked; "but I
don’t mind it, for they were always a nuisance, and you’ll find them so in

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less than a year_I wouldn’t give ten cents apiece for them.” Similarly,

Emma Holmes expressed pleasure over the departure of several house
slaves, 'Tor we do not want unwilling, careless, neglectful servants about
us,” and a Georgia woman described the loss of a maid as "Good riddance:
all parties quite relieved. ” 62

But relief from the anxieties of supervising blacks could last only so
long as white families managed to perform the house and field labor them¬
selves or find suitable white replacements. That proved to be a painfully
brief period of time. Even as planters recognized the need to maintain a
work force, however, they were now in a position to make some important
decisions, not only about the disposition of the old and the very young but
how many and which of the able-bodied ex-slaves they wished to retain.
Noting how her neighbor had been "awfully sanguine” over losing his
slaves, Mary Chesnut thought she knew why. "His main idea is joy that he
has no Negroes to support, and can hire only those that he really wants.”
Although she had always had reservations about slavery, Mary Chesnut
found no difficulty in sharing her neighbor’s realistic appraisal of emanci¬
pation. "The Negroes are a good riddance,” she confided to her diary. "A
hired man is far cheaper than a man whose father and mother, his wife and
his twelve children have to be fed, clothed, housed, nursed, taxes paid and
doctors’ bills.” 63

Whatever the former slaveholders thought of emancipation, it
afforded them a convenient way out of supporting nonproductive laborers.
Hence, a wealthy Richmond resident, who had owned large numbers of
slaves, could suggest that the Emancipation Proclamation provided more
immediate relief for the masters than for the intended benefactors of free¬
dom. "It will prove a good thing for the slave-owners,” he explained; "for
it will be quite as cheap to hire our labor as to own it, and we shall now
be rid of supporting the old and decrepit servants, such as were formerly
left to die on our hands.” Not all masters rushed to evict their older slaves,
and some would have found it repugnant to their moral sensibilities, but
many had no qualms about driving them off their plantations or thinking
in such terms, even as they regretted the circumstances that made it
necessary and claimed to sympathize with the victims. But why as employ¬
ers should they assume any greater responsibilities than their far wealth¬
ier counterparts in the North? "We are to hire them just as free labor is
hired in the North,” Elias Horry Deas reasoned, as he tried to resume rice
cultivation in South Carolina. "I hope this may be so for if it is, I think we
will be better off, & be able to plant more successfully than we have ever
yet done, as we will not have a crew of old idle lazy negros with their
children to feed & clothe .” 64

Now that the blacks were no longer a financial investment, they sud¬
denly became expendable—but only some of them. While freedmen made
decisions about whether to remain on the same plantation, their former
masters determined whom they wished to keep with them, based largely
on previous records of behavior. "Now that they are all free,” Charles C.

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Jones, Jr., wrote his mother, "there are several of them not worth the
hiring.” She agreed, and named one in particular: "Cato has been to me a
most insolent, indolent, and dishonest man; I have not a shadow of confi¬
dence in him, and will not wish to retain him on the place.” If any planter
felt uneasy about evicting the elderly, he might still eagerly avail himself
of the opportunity to purge the work force of the proven troublemakers, the
least efficient, and the bad influences, as well as those who were too quick
to drop the old deference after emancipation. The sudden discovery that
one of his former slaves had deceived him was sufficient provocation to
discharge him. On an Alabama plantation, the newly freed workers affixed
their marks to a labor contract, except for Arch, who signed his full name.
That was too much for his former master, who ordered him off the place.
"You done stayed in war wid me four years,” he told him, "and I ain’t
known that was in you. Now I ain’t got no confidence in you.” The tribula¬
tions that awaited the employers of free black labor would provide still
other excuses for discharging their former slaves. Thus did an elderly
Virginia freedman find himself on the road to Richmond without a home.
His master had become enraged after the able-bodied hands left him rather
than work without wages, and he had countered this affront by driving
everyone off the plantation, including the sick and the aged, declaring that
he had no use "fo’ old wore-out niggers.”

I knowed I was old and wore-out, but I growed so in his service. I served

him and his father befo’e nigh on to sixty year; and he never give me a

dollar. He’s had my life, and now I’m old and wore-out I must leave. It’s

right hard, mahster!

Although not knowing what to expect now, he made it clear that he had
no desire to return to the old bondage. "I’d sooner be as I is to-day.” And
with those words, he placed his bundle on his back and made his way along
the road to Richmond . 65

When it came to making practical decisions about the ideal labor force,
planters divided sharply over whether to retain their former slaves or seek
an entirely new group of blacks. Having known them so intimately as
slaves, and accustomed to their deference, some families were disturbed at
the idea of living with these same people as free laborers with the same
rights as themselves. Perhaps, they reasoned, the former slaves knew them
too intimately as well. Without citing any specific reason, Elias Horry
Deas, the South Carolina rice planter, informed his daughter that "the
general feeling on the river” was to discharge all the hands at the end of
the season. "There are a very few of mine that I think I will hire again, &
there is many an old one that will have to quit.” At the same time, Edward
Lynch, also a rice planter, returned from a meeting in Savannah where the
assembled planters concluded that "the worst possible labor for a man to
employ was the labor formerly belonging to him .” 66

But the clear preference in most instances was to retain the slaves they

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had known and supervised in the past. On the same day the master in¬
formed them of their freedom, he usually asked them to remain and work
for some kind of compensation, with perhaps an added inducement to
complete the current crops. How the freed slaves would respond, however,
remained questionable. Although the "old ties” binding blacks and their
"white folks” persisted long after the war, each freedman and each former
owner clearly felt them in different degrees, and many felt nothing at all.
It was possible for a freed slave to retain a certain affection for the old
master without feeling any obligation to continue to serve him. To place
any confidence in him—or perhaps in any white man or woman—was
something altogether different. "You jes’ let ’em lone, ma’am,” a freed-
woman observed of white people. "Yur never know which way a cat is going
to jump .” 67

Not long after the war, the wife of a former slave trader watched in
horror as a freedman in Petersburg, Virginia, skinned a live catfish.
Clearly upset, she asked him how he could be so cruel. "Why, dis is de way
dey used to do me,” he replied, "and I’s gwine to get even wid somebody.”
Judging by the way many whites talked in the aftermath of emancipation,
that was the fate that awaited them at the hands of blacks, who would now
wreak a terrible revenge on those who had kept them in bondage. The
South Carolina planter who glimpsed in the "looks and language” of the
freed slaves "great bitterness toward the whites” gave voice to familiar
fears that mounted with every report of a disorder, every act of "insolence,”
and every jubilant black chorus promising to hang Jefferson Davis—and
presumably the leading "rebels” along with him. Once again, there was no
way the blacks could win the debate over whether they intended to avenge
bondage by turning emancipation into a racial bloodbath. If they retaliated
for the wrongs visited upon them and sought to punish their former mas¬
ters, they revealed their ingratitude and savage natures. If they refrained
from violence and showed compassion for their former owners, they re¬
vealed their natural docility, slavish mentality, and inferiority as men . 68

In observing the black regiment he commanded, almost all of them
former slaves, Colonel Higginson expressed surprise over the absence of
any feelings of affection or revenge toward their former masters and mis¬
tresses. On one occasion, during a raid in Florida, a black sergeant had
pointed out to him the spot where whites had hanged his brother for
leading a band of runaway slaves. What impressed Higginson was the
sergeant’s remarkable composure and self-control as he related the story.
"He spoke of it as a historic matter,” Higginson recalled, "without any
bearing on the present issue.” None of his men, he noticed, ever spoke
nostalgically about slavery times but neither did they evince in his pres-

200

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

ence any desire to seek a violent revenge on their former owners. Rather,
they tended in their conversations to discriminate between various types
of slaveholders, with some of them claiming to have had "kind” owners who
had bestowed occasional favors upon them. But that in no way lessened
their hatred of the institution of slavery. "It was not the individuals,” wrote
Higginson, "but the ownership, of which they complained. That they saw
to be a wrong which no special kindnesses could right .” 69

But if Higginson detected no mood of vengeance, other whites were less
certain. While the North engaged in a furious debate over what to do with
the South and the Confederate leaders, more than one curious northern
visitor thought to ask the freedmen they encountered what kind of punish¬
ment should be meted out to their former masters. The question itself made
many blacks visibly uncomfortable, as though torn between what they
really felt and what they thought the white reporters wanted to hear. Not
being certain, many chose obfuscation. Although a few openly declared
that hang in g would be "too good” for their masters, the general response
was that the Yankees should settle this question. If any slaveholders were
to be punished, few if any of their former slaves wished to be around for
the event, either to carry it out or to witness it. The same ex-slave who
thought hanging was "too good” for his master rejected the invitation (no
doubt made in jest) of a Union officer to inflict the punishment himself.
"Oh, no, can’t do it,” he replied, "can’t do it—can’t see massa suffer. Don’t
want to see him suffer.” With similar expressions of horror, a group of
South Carolina blacks responded to a Yankee soldier who had promised to
return their master to them for any action they deemed appropriate.

"Oh! don’t massa, don’t bring him here; we no want to see him nebber
more,” shouted a chorus of women.

"But what shall we do with him?”

"Do what you please,” said the chorus.

"Shall we hang him?”

"If you want, massa”—somewhat thoughtfully.

"But shall we bring him here and hang him?”

Chorus—much excited and shriller than ever—"no, no, don’t fetch
him here, we no want to see him nebber more again.”

Since these freedmen were also occupying and working the land of their
absent master, their reaction made considerable sense . 70

As for punishing Confederate leaders, blacks may have sung about
hanging Jeff Davis to a crab-apple tree but a black preacher came closer
to capturing popular feelings: "O Lord, shake Jeff Davis ober de mouf ob
Hell, but O Lord, doan’ drap him in!” Except for the confiscation of land,
most freedmen saw little to gain by the punishment of ex-Confederate
leaders; on the contrary, some feared that an aroused white populace would
surely visit its rage on the most vulnerable targets—the newly freed slaves.
Gertrude Thomas, a white resident of Augusta, Georgia, had only to watch

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201

the cheering blacks running down the street, all of them eager for a glimpse
of Jefferson Davis as a prisoner, to wish at that moment she could have
destroyed the whole motley group with a volley of gunfire. Recognizing how
intensely whites felt about this issue, blacks who thought about it at all
tended to view such matters in personal and pragmatic terms, calculating
the effect it might have on their own lives and destinies. Few expressed that
more pointedly than the freedmen of Claiborne County, Mississippi, when
they petitioned the governor in 1865 to relieve them of oppressive laws and
dishonest employers. "All we ask is justice and to be treated like human
beings,” they pleaded, while making it clear they extended those principles
to all people and bore no animosity toward their former masters.

We have good white friends and we depend on them by the help of god
to see us righted and we not want our rights by Murdering. We owe to[o]
much to many of our white friends that has shown us Mercy in bygon

dayes To harm thaim_Some of us wish Mr. Jeff Davis to be Set at

liberty for we [k]no[w] worse Masters than he was. Altho he tried hard
to keep us all slaves we forgive him.

Elizabeth Keckley, who had worked as a maid for Davis, thought singling
him out for punishment was simply irrelevant to the noble cause that had
prompted her to leave his service. "The years have brought many changes,”
she reflected; "and in view of these terrible changes even I, who was once
a slave, who have been punished with the cruel lash, who have experienced
the heart and soul tortures of a slave’s life, can say to Mr. Jefferson Davis,
'Peace! you have suffered! Go in peace.’ ” Regardless of how blacks had
viewed the war, most of them could concur with the idea of amnesty for
Jefferson Davis, if only because they intended to remain in a society made
up largely of people of his color and outlook. 71

The ambivalence that had always characterized the relations between
slaves and their white families, along with the pragmatic need to placate
an angry and bitter white South, was bound to affect how freedmen per¬
ceived their beaten and discouraged former masters and mistresses. The
way in which Samuel Boulware, a former South Carolina slave, recalled
the day the Yankees pillaged his master’s plantation typified a widely felt
reaction. "Us slaves was sorry dat day for marster and mistress. They was
gittin’ old, and now they had lost all they had, and more than dat, they
knowed their slaves was set free.” Even so, many white families were left
to question the depth of such feelings, particularly after what some
of them had endured at the hands of their blacks, and came away with
altogether different impressions. While a South Carolina planter saw ha¬
tred of whites in the faces of the freedmen, a North Carolinian expressed
the certainty that they "felt for their masters and secretly sympathized
with their ruin,” and she appreciatively noted what local blacks had writ¬
ten on a huge banner they unfurled at a recent celebration: "Respect for
Former Owners.” 72

202

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

That "respect” might assume more tangible forms than commisera¬
tions banners. Much as the wartime distress had sometimes brought
masters and slaves closer together, the hard times that followed the war
taxed the charitable instincts of both races. Although some freedmen re¬
turned to the old place seeking help to tide them over a difficult period, the
need for assistance worked both ways. Numerous white families, reduced
to economic privation by the war and the loss of their property, felt no
compunctions (at least, none they admitted) about calling on their former
bondsmen for help. Whether out of affection, pity, or that old sense of
mutual obligations, ex-slaves invariably responded with generosity to the
plight of their old masters and mistresses, at least to the extent they could
afford to be generous. Had it not been for a former slave who shared his
pamingg with her, a North Carolina woman confessed, the family could
hardly have survived the loss of their property. Two years after the war,
her black benefactor died. "But even at the last,” the grateful woman
recalled, "he had not forgotten us. He left $600 to me, and $400 to one of
my family.” 73

No doubt many freedmen derived a certain satisfaction from extend¬
ing a helping hand to those who had once held them in bondage. On the
Sea Islands, for example, the success of blacks in working the abandoned
plantations made them "objects of attention” to the dispossessed planters,
who paid occasional visits to the old places, often to seek material assist¬
ance while they waited to reclaim their lands. Some women even went from
cabin to cabin among their former slaves, pleading the family’s poverty and
eagerly collecting food, silverware, dishes, and a little money. Such dona¬
tions, a Federal official observed, were made partly out of pity but also to
impress upon the owners how well they were managing themselves as free
people—"an intense satisfaction if a little boastful.” On one plantation,
.T im Cashman welcomed his former master back, offering him the same
courtesies and warm hospitality any southern gentleman might extend to
a visitor and proudly reciting his achievements.

"The Lord has blessed us since you have been gone. It used to be Mr.
Fuller No. 1, now it is Jim Cashman No. 1. Would you like to take a drive
through the island Sir? I have a horse and buggy of my own now Sir, and
I would like to take you to see my own little lot of land and my new house
on it, and I have as fine a crop of cotton Sir, as ever you did see, if you
please—and Jim can let you have ten dollars if you want them, Sir.”

The former owner graciously accepted both his hospitality and his assis¬
tance. In still another instance, a Georgia freedman amassed some savings
from working in a sawmill while at the same time planting cotton in a
small lot he had purchased. Upon the death of his former master, he came
to the aid of the mistress, who had been left without any land and appar¬
ently penniless. He supported her until the woman’s death some two years
later. Only when it came to paying the cost of her funeral did local resi-

Slaves No More

203

dents balk, saying, "He done his share already,” but her own kind would
bury her. 74

While serving the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, John Wil¬
liam De Forest, a white agent, recalled a former slave who appeared at his
office, not to pick up rations for himself, but to make a personal appeal on
behalf of the Jacksons, a local white family in dire need of help. Except for
the sudden plunge in the fortunes of this family, their plight and incapacity
for steady labor, as described by this freedman, resembled the pessimistic
white accounts of postwar blacks.

"They’s mighty bad off. He’s in bed, sick—ha’n’t been able to git about
this six weeks—and his chil’n’s begging food of my chil’n. They used to
own three or four thous’n acres; they was great folks befo’ the war. It’s
no use tellin’ them kind to work; they don’t know how to work, and can’t
work; somebody’s got to help ’em, Sir. I used to belong to one branch of
that family, and so I takes an interest in ’em. I can’t bear to see such folks
come down so. It hurts my feelings, Sir.” 75

Even compassion had its limits. If some freed slaves manifested sympa¬
thy for their broken and impoverished or dead masters and mistresses,
there remained those who saw no reason to feel remorse of any kind. ”1
never had no whitefolks that was good to me,” Annie Hawkins recalled of
her bondage in Georgia and Texas. "Old Mistress died soon after the War
and we didn’t care either. She didn’t never do nothing to make us love her.
We was jest as glad as when old Master died.” On the Sea Islands, the
generosity displayed by freedmen and freedwomen went only so far, and
they made clear the distinction between serving their former masters and
helping them. When a former resident sent word that "she thought some
of her Ma’s niggers might come to wait upon her,” none volunteered;
instead, some of them went to see her and offered some food, money, and
clothes, and the woman in return swallowed her pride and position and
agreed to become a dressmaker for the blacks. After the initial gestures of
goodwill, moreover, freedmen became concerned lest their generosity be
misunderstood and abused. "They say that two come for every one they
send away relieved,” a Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported from the Sea
Islands, "and that it is a new way 'maussa’ has of making them work for
him.”

Although the "masters” weep with joy at the sight of their humble
friends, and though one of them said he "should go away and cut his
throat if they looked coldly upon him,” yet the people are only tran¬
siently touched by this manifestation of affection. They look very jeal¬
ously and uneasily upon all who return, often ask why Government lets
them come back to trouble the freedman.

Near Beaufort, a former owner visited the old place, shook the hands of his
former slaves, pleaded his poverty, and asked for sympathy and spare

204

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

change. After all, he told them, they should realize that he and his wife
knew nothing of work and had never done any. The ex-slaves needed no
reminder, nor did they respond favorably to his plight when it became clear
that he coveted the return of his lands upon which they were now work¬
ing. 76

Whatever the mixed emotions with which freedmen viewed their for¬
mer owners after emancipation, nothing could obliterate the slave experi¬
ence from their minds, and it would continue to shape the attitudes and
behavior of many of them long after their old masters and mistresses had
passed from the scene. Some preferred to put the past behind them, if only
to contain their emotions and memories. Nearly a decade after the war, an
older student at Hampton Institute, a black college, told a teacher that he
preferred not to talk about slavery times. ”1 feel as if folks mightn’t believe
me, and then, if I think too much about them myself, I can’t keep feeling
right , as I want to, toward my old masters. I’d do any thing for them I could,
and I want to forget what they have done to me.” When in the twentieth
century ex-slaves reminisced about the old days, they were apt to be less
harsh in their judgments, though Martin Jackson, who recalled "good
treatment,” suspected many of them deliberately refrained from telling
everything they knew.

Lots of old slaves closes the door before they tell the truth about their
days of slavery. When the door is open, they tell how kind their masters
was and how rosy it all was. You can’t blame them for this, because they
had plenty of early discipline, making them cautious about saying any¬
thing uncomplimentary about their masters. I, myself, was in a little
different position than most slaves and, as a consequence, have no
grudges or resentment. However, I can tell you the life of the average
slave was not rosy. They were dealt out plenty of cruel suffering. Even
with my good treatment, I spent most of my time planning and thinking
of running away.

But in the immediate aftermath of the war, memories were quite short, in
some instances as short as the tempers of ex-slaves. All that might be
required to set them off was the casual pronouncement by some northern
visitor or reporter that many masters had been kind to their slaves.
"Kind!” one freedman cried, not believing the naivete and ignorance of the
person who made the observation of his former master. "Kind! I was dat
man’s slave; and he sold my wife, and he sold my two chill’en... Kind! yes,
he gib me com enough, and he gib me pork enough, and he neber gib me
one lick wid de whip, but whar’s my wife?—whar’s my chill’en? Take away
de pork, I say; take away de corn, I can work and raise dese for myself, but
gib me back de wife of my bosom, and gib me back my poor chill’en as was
sold away!” 77

To forgive their former masters and mistresses for past wrongs was to
forget neither the wrongs nor the men and women who had inflicted them.

Slaves No More

205

Forgiveness, like compassion, could be extended only so far. For many
former slaves, the teachings of Christianity and their recollections of bond¬
age would never be easily reconciled. Harry Jarvis remembered working
for "de meanest man on all de Easte’n sho’, and dat’s a heap to say.” Early
in the war, he fled the plantation, eventually joined the Union Army, and
lost a leg in the Battle of Folly Island. Some years later, two white school¬
teachers questioned him about slavery days, his escape and army service,
and his intense religious conversion immediately after the war. "As you
have experienced religion,” one of the teachers asked him, "I suppose you
have forgiven your old master, haven’t you?” The question came unexpect¬
edly, the glow immediately left the man’s face, and he dropped his head.
Upon recovering his composure, he straightened himself and gave his re¬
ply. "Yes, sah! Fse forgub him; de Lord knows Fse forgub him; but”—and
now his eyes suddenly blazed—"but I’d gib my oder leg to meet him in
battle!” The schoolteachers thought it best at this moment to terminate the
conversation. 78

How their former slaves would perceive them had to be uppermost in
the minds of the absentee planter families returning to their homes after
the war. Where owners had abandoned their plantations, the slaves had
often remained and continued to work the land, and in some regions they
had been encouraged to believe that the land and the crops would remain
in their hands. Now that the war had ended, however, the planters re¬
turned to reclaim their property—all but the slaves, whose freedom they
were forced to acknowledge. Before long, many of the white families ex¬
pected that life on the plantations would be very much as they had known
it before the war. But success, as they clearly understood, still rested on the
availability of labor—free black labor. As they approached the familiar
surroundings, they had little way of knowing how many of their former
slaves had remained, how they would be greeted, the extent to which the
"old ties” had survived the crisis, and the kind of relationship they would
be able to establish with those they had once called their "people.” The
range of reactions they encountered suggested the diversity of black re¬
sponse and expectations elsewhere in the South.

Except for the physical devastation, some families found that little had
changed since their hasty departure. Some of their slaves had left, never
to be seen again, but substantial numbers had remained and still others
would shortly return. The homecoming proved in some instances to be a
most pleasant occasion, exceeding the expectations of the white family and
allaying whatever fears they might have entertained. When he came onto
his plantations near Natchez, a former Confederate general encountered
"a perfect jubilee” celebrating his return. "They picked me up and carried

206

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

me into the house on their shoulders, and God-blessed me, and tanked de
Lo’d for me, till I thought they were never going to get through.” Returning
to his "large and elegant” town house in Charleston, a former South
Carolina slave owner found it occupied by his servants, "who were as
humble, respectful and attentive as of old”; in his absence, they had kept
the place "in the neatest and cleanest style.” No doubt his gratitude over¬
flowed when he compared his situation with that of his far less fortunate
neighbors, who found their places occupied by strange blacks cooking their
meals in the drawing rooms. 79

Despite the effusive homecomings, some planters quickly perceived
that appearances could be quite deceiving. When Stephen Elliott returned
to his father’s plantation at Beaufort, South Carolina, he found the former
slaves comfortably settled and in good spirits. "They were delighted to see
me, and treated me with overflowing affection.” The scene seemed to sug¬
gest that nothing had happened in his absence. But he soon learned other¬
wise, and in a most abrupt and unexpected manner. Although they greeted
him warmly, the newly freed blacks combined their hospitality with an
explicit statement of how matters now stood between them and their for¬
mer owner. "They waited on me as before, gave me beautiful breakfasts
and splendid dinners; but they firmly and respectfully informed me: 'We
own this land now. Put it out of your head that it will ever be yours
again.’ ” 80

The initial difficulty for some planters lay less in reclaiming their land
than in dealing with changes in the demeanor of their former slaves. That
"total change of manner” surprised and hurt Edward Barnwell Heyward
"most of all” when he arrived to take over the Combahee rice plantations
in South Carolina he had only recently inherited from his father. Only a
year before, he had seen these people at the plantation to which they had
been removed during the war, and they had seemed faithful and content.
But now, as he wrote his wife, "Oh! what a change. It would kill my Father
and worries me more than I expected or rather the condition of the Negroes
on that place is worse than I expected. It is very evident they are disap¬
pointed at my coming there. They were in hopes of... having the place to
themselves.” Not only did they refuse at first to come out of their cabins
but when they did deign to speak with him, the old deference had given way
to a provoking familiarity. "If I could meet with impudence, accompanied
with intelligence,” Heyward told his wife, "it would not be so bad but to
find the brutish rice field hands familiar, is perfectly disgusting. I have seen
nothing like it before .. .” 81

Rather than manifest any feelings of remorse or hatred for their for¬
mer masters, many of the newly freed slaves would have been perfectly
content never to see them again. Nowhere was this feeling more pervasive,
of course, than on those lands they had been working and claiming as their
own. The night before Captain Thomas Pinckney returned to El Dorado,
his plantation fronting the Santee River in South Carolina, he stayed at the
home of a neighbor who had overseen the property in his absence. His

Slaves No More

207

report was less than reassuring. "Your negroes sacked your house, stripped
it of furniture, bric-a-brac, heirlooms, and divided these among themselves.
They got it into their heads that the property of whites belongs to them;
and went about taking possession with utmost determination and inso¬
lence. Nearly all houses here have been served the same way.” Proceeding
to his plantation the next day, Pinckney could immediately sense how
much the times had changed. Where he had once been welcomed by crowds
of slaves shouting, "Howdy do, Marster! Howdy do, Boss!” only silence now
greeted him. None of his former slaves was in sight. In the house, he found
a solitary servant, and she seemed pleased to see him. But she claimed to
know nothing about where the others had hidden themselves. The dinner
hour passed but still none of the blacks ventured forward. Finally, the
exasperated planter told his servant that he would come back in the morn¬
ing and expected to see every one of his former slaves.

When Pinckney returned, he was armed. Since he had often carried a
gun as a huntsman, he thought he could do so now "without betraying
distrust” or causing any undue alarm among his men. But even as he
armed himself, he tried to deny the necessity for doing so.

Indeed, I felt no fear or distrust; these were my own servants, between
whom and myself the kindest feelings had always existed. They had been
carefully and conscientiously trained by my parents; I had grown up with
some of them. They had been glad to see me from the time that, as a little
boy, I accompanied my mother when she made Saturday afternoon
rounds of the quarters, carrying a bowl of sugar, and followed by her little
handmaidens bearing other things coloured people liked. At every cabin
that she found swept and cleaned, she left a present as an encouragement
to tidiness. I could not realise a need of going protected among my own
people, whom I could only remember as respectful, happy and affection¬
ate.

After telling the servant to summon the men, he waited for them under the
trees. Slowly, they began to appear, and Pinckney could see only sullen and
defiant faces, none of them showing the slightest trace of that "old-time
cordiality.” No longer, as he quickly noted, did they address him as
"Marster” but instead made a point of referring to him as "you” or
"Cap’n.” That was not all he noticed. His former slaves, too, had brought
their guns. "Men, I know you are free,” he told them. "I do not wish to
interfere with your freedom. But I want my old hands to work my lands
for me. I will pay you wages.” The blacks remained silent. "I want you to
put my place in order,” he continued, "and make it as fruitful as it lised
to be, when it supported us all in peace and plenty. I recognise your right
to go elsewhere and work for some one else, but I want you to work for me
and I will on my part do all I can for you.”

This time they responded; their remarks were brief, punctuated with
defiance, and accompanied by none of the old "darky” antics. "O yes, we

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gwi wuk! we gwi wuk all right,” one of them assured him, but in a tone that
suggested trouble rather than compliance. "We gwi wuk. We gwi wuk full
ourse’ves. We ain’ gwi wuk fuh no white man.” If they refused to work for
any white man, Pinckney asked them, where did they intend to go and how
would they support themselves? He had only to look at their faces to
anticipate their reply. "We ain’ gwine nowhar,” they declared. "We gwi
wuk right here on de Ian’ whar we wuz bo’n an’ whar belongs tuh us.” Some
of them had not been bom on this land, Pinckney recalled to himself, but
had been purchased by him during the war—"in the kindness ofhis heart”
—to avoid the division of a family in the settlement of an estate. If such
thoughts crossed the minds of any of the blacks, there was nothing to
indicate it. One of them, dressed in a Union Army uniform and carrying
a rifle, made it clear that he would work or not as he pleased, come and
go as he pleased, and he claimed a portion of the land as his own. And then,
as if to underscore these words, he went to his cabin, stood in the doorway,
looked his former master in the eye, brought his gun down, with a crash,
and declared, "Yes, I gwi wuk right here. Fd like tuh see any man put me
outer dis house!”

After giving the blacks some time to reconsider their position, Pinck¬
ney assembled them once again. If anything, their attitude had grown
"more insolent and aggressive.” Failing to reach any understanding with
them, he now gave his former slaves ten days, after which those who
remained unwilling to work for him would be forced off the plantation.
Meanwhile, Pinckney heard of neighbors having similar experiences, some
of them "severer trials” than his own. Where only a few years before
"perfect confidence” had characterized slave-master relations, or so he
thought, almost every white man now went armed, with his weapon ex¬
posed to view, and so presumably did most of the blacks. After consulting
among themselves, the planters finally appealed directly to the Union
Army commander at Charleston, and he agreed to send a company of
troops and to address the blacks himself.

Despite the "Federal visitation,” which Pinckney thought had a
"wholesome effect,” the blacks still refused to work. He decided now to wait
them out until "starvation” brought about their capitulation. He did not
have to wait long. One day, his former head plower came to see him,
claiming that he could no longer feed his wife and children. When Pinck¬
ney reminded him that he had brought this grief on himself and could
return to work at any time, the former slave replied, "Cap’n, Fse willin’.
I been willin’ fuh right smart while. I ain’ nuwer seed dis way we been
doin’ wuz zackly right. I been ’fused in my min’. But de other niggers dee
won’ let me wuk. Dee don’ want me tuh work fuh you, suh. Fse feared.”
Although Pinckney considered distributing some food rations "without
conditions,” he decided that this might be interpreted as a sign of weak¬
ness. Several days later, as he no doubt expected, his head plower reap¬
peared. "Cap’n, I come tuh ax you tuh lemme wuk fuh you, suh.” The
planter assented, told him the plow and mule were ready, and he could now

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draw his rations. Having broken the back of the resistance, Pinckney now
had the final satisfaction of watching his former slaves slowly drift back
to their cabins and out into the fields. "They had suffered,” he recalled,
"and their ex-master had suffered with them.” 82

The ordeal of Adele Allston, like that of Thomas Pinckney, suggested
comparable situations, particularly in low-country South Carolina, where
the reluctance of freed slaves to yield their brief occupation of the planta¬
tions often reached the dimensions of outright rebellion. The death of
Robert F. W. Allston had left his wife with the responsibility of managing
the several plantations belonging to the family, located in a section of
South Carolina where blacks outnumbered whites by six to one. When the
Yankees came into this region, many of the planter families had fled. On
the Allston plantations, the slaves plundered the houses, seized the bam
keys, locked up the overseer at Nightingale Hall, and completely intimi¬
dated the overseer at Chicora Wood. With the end of the war, Adele Allston
moved almost immediately to reclaim her property and reestablish her
authority. The initial skirmishes were fought over the keys to the barns,
which contained the crops that the blacks had already made. Union sol¬
diers had turned the keys over to the slaves, encouraging them in some
instances to distribute the contents among themselves. Both the freed
slaves and the planters recognized that whoever controlled those keys
exercised more than symbolic authority over the plantations themselves.
"This would be a test case, as it were,” wrote Elizabeth Allston, who would
accompany her mother on the trip. "If the keys were given up, it would
mean that the former owners still had some rights.”

After taking the oath of allegiance to the United States and securing
a written order which commanded the blacks to surrender the keys, Adele
Alls ton and her daughter set out for the plantations. They were under no
illusions as to what they might expect to find there. "If you come here,” a
close friend had warned, "all your servants who have not families so large
as to burthen them and compel a veneering of fidelity, will immediately
leave you. The others will be more or less impertinent as the humor takes
tho rn and in short will do as they choose.” If she still insisted on returning,
her friend offered some advice: "I warn you ... not to stir up the evil
passions of the blacks against you and your family if you wish to return
here. The blacks are masters of the situation, this is a conquered country
and for the moment law and order are in abeyance.” And one sure way "to
stir up the evil passions,” she believed, was to attempt to dispossess the
blacks of the property they had seized. "The negroes would force you to
leave the place, perhaps do worse. I have not been in my negro street nor
spoken to a field hand since 1st March. The only way is to give them rope
enough, if too short it might hang us. No outrage has been committed
against the whites except in the matter of property.” If her friend’s warn¬
ings were not sufficiently alarming, Adele Allston had only to read a recent
letter from the overseer at Chicora Wood, in which he related how the
blacks permitted him to say nothing to them about work. Despite these

210

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

ominous reports, Adele Allston remained adamant in her determination to
return and face her former slaves. It was bound to be a memorable experi¬
ence.

Arriving first at the Nightingale Hall plantation (where the blacks had
been "specially turbulent”), Adele and Elizabeth Allston encountered less
trouble than they had anticipated. Stepping out of the carriage (but insist¬
ing that her daughter remain inside), Mrs. Allston stood in the midst of her
former slaves, spoke to each of them by name, and inquired after their
children. Gradually, the initial tension eased, the black foreman surren¬
dered the keys, and the Allstons quickly moved on. "She did not think it
wise to go to the barn to look at the crops,” Elizabeth wrote of her mother.
"Having gained her point, she thought it best to leave.” At the Chicora
Wood plantation, the keys were handed over with even less difficulty. The
Allstons concluded that was because Daddy Primus, the head carpenter,
who held the keys, "was a very superior, good old man.” Although the
blacks here "seemed glad” to see them, the house which they had helped
to plunder stood there for everyone to view, and many of the furnishings
now adorned their cabins.

That left the most formidable challenge, the Guendalos plantation,
which belonged to Adele Allston’s son, Benjamin, whose service in the
Confederate Army had kept him away from home during most of the war.
With no whites present, the slaves had been reportedly "turbulent and
excited.” As they neared the plantation, the two Allston women had only
to look around them to confirm their worst fears. The former slaves lined
the road on both sides, a mood of defiance clearly reflected in their "angry,
sullen black faces.” What a contrast, Elizabeth thought, between then-
present demeanor and "the pleasant smile and courtesy or bow to which
we were accustomed.” Instead of the usual warm welcome, only an "omi¬
nous silence” prevailed. As the carriage passed the blacks, they formed a
line behind it and followed it into the plantation.

Stopping in front of the bam, the two women found themselves sud¬
denly surrounded by several hundred blacks. The mistress stepped down
from the carriage and asked to see Uncle Jacob, the former black driver
who had been left in charge of Guendalos during the war. After he showed
her the rice and com barns, she complimented him on the condition of the
stored crops. But when Adele Allston then demanded the keys, the driver
refused to give them up unless ordered to do so by a Federal officer. After
reading the written order which Mrs. Allston had procured, however, he
finally relented and slowly drew the keys from his pocket. Before he could
hand them over, a young black man who had been standing nearby shook
his fist at the driver and warned him, "Ef yu gie up de key, blood'll flow.”
The Crowd immediately shouted its agreement until it became "a deafening
clamor.” The driver thought it best to pocket the keys, while the blacks,
now "yelling, talking, gesticulating,” pressed closer around the two
women, leaving them virtually no standing room. Finally, the mistress
ordered her carriage driver to bring her son, Charles, to the place. At the

Slaves No More

211

same time, the blacks decided to send for the nearest Union officer. Before
leaving, however, the black envoys admonished the crowd, "Don’t let no
white man een dat gate,” and the remaining blacks responded, "No, no, we
won’t let no white pusson een, we’ll chop um down wid hoe—we’ll chop urn
to pieces sho’.” Adding emphasis to their threat, some of them held up their
sharp and gleaming rice-field hoes, while others brandished pitchforks,
hickory sticks, and guns.

With no white person within five miles, the Allstons waited. While
strolling about the plantation, they found themselves again surrounded by
a shouting "mob of men, women, and children,” some of them dancing,
some singing. To the two white women, the scene took on an eerie and
unreal dimension.

They sang sometimes in unison, sometimes in parts, strange words which
we did not understand, followed by a much-repeated chorus:

f 7 free, I free!

I free as a frog!

I free till I fool!

Glory Alleluia!

They revolved around us, holding out their skirts and dancing—now with
slow, swinging movements, now with rapid jig-motions, but always with
weird chant and wild gestures.

The Allston carriage driver returned alone, unable to locate the mistress’s
son. "It was a great relief to me,” Elizabeth recalled, "for though I have
been often laughed at for the opinion, I hold that there is a certain kind
of chivalry in the negroes—they wanted blood, they wanted to kill some
one, but they couldn’t make up their minds to kill two defenseless ladies;
but if Charley had been found and brought, I firmly believe it would have
kindled the flame.” Now determined to wait for the Union Army officers,
the two women tried to ignore the "blasphemous mutterings and threats”
they heard around them as they paced the plantation grounds. Finally,
word reached the plantation that the officers could not be located but that
the driver and one other black (perhaps to look after him) had gone to
Georgetown to seek assistance.

Exhausted by the long ordeal, the two Allston women slept that night
in their nearby Plantersville home, "which had no lock of any kind on the
door.” Early the next morning, a knock at the door awakened them. Before
they could reach the hallway, the door opened and a black hand held out
the keys to Guendalos. "No word was spoken—it was Jacob,” Elizabeth
Allston recalled; "he gave them in silence, and mamma received them with
the same solemnity. The bloodless battle had been won.” 83

To the Allstons, as to Thomas Pinckney and others, the battles they
waged and won to reclaim their lands could easily be viewed as a struggle

212

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

of wills in which the character and superiority of white men and women
inevitably prevailed. But to the blacks, the defeats they sustained resulted
not from a failure of will but from the readiness of Federal authorities to
back up the legal claims of whites to their land. Nevertheless, even if
planters remained certain of their land titles, they came to fear the turbu¬
lence which so often marked the efforts to reestablish a semblance of
authority over their former slaves. The range of receptions accorded white
families returning to their homes after the war suggests only one dimen¬
sion in the unraveling of the complex relationships that had made up the
"peculiar institution.” On most plantations and farms, the whites had
remained, along with their slaves, and the issue at the moment of freedom
was not so much who owned the land and the crops but on whose land the
newly freed slaves would continue to plant and harvest the crops.

Where the master assembled the blacks to tell them they were no longer
his slaves, the reactions he provoked gave rise to the legendary stories of
a "Day of Jubilo,” in which crowds of ecstatically happy blacks shouted,
sang, and danced their way into freedom. Large numbers of former slaves
recalled no such celebration. Although not entirely myth, the notion of a
Jubilee, with its suggestion of unrestrained, unt h in k i n g black hilarity,
tends to neglect if not demean the wide range and depth of black responses
to emancipation, including the trauma and fears the master’s announce¬
ment produced on some plantations. The very nature of the bondage they
had endured, the myriad of experiences to which they had been exposed,
the quality of the ties that had bound them to their "white folks,” and the
ambivalence which had suffused those relationships were all bound to
mfllrft for a diverse and complex reaction on the day the slaves were told
they no longer had any masters or mistresses.

Capturing nearly the full range of responses, a former South Carolina
slave recalled that on his plantation "some were sorry, some hurt, but a few
were silent and glad.” From the perspective of the mistress of a Florida
household, "some of the men cried, some spoke regretfully, [and] only two
looked surly and had nothing to say.” Although celebrations seldom fol¬
lowed the master’s announcement, numerous blacks recalled taking the
rest of the day off, if only to think through the implications of what they
had been told. Still others, like Harriett Robinson, remembered that before
the master could even finish his remarks, "over half them niggers was
gone.” But the slaves on an Alabama plantation stood quietly, stunned by
the news. "We didn’ hardly know what he means,” Jenny Proctor recalled.
"We jes’ sort of huddle ’round together like scared rabbits, but after we
knowed what he mean, didn’ many of us go, ’cause we didn’ know where
to of went.” None of them knew what to expect from freedom and they

Slaves No More

213

interpreted it in many different ways, explained James Lucas, a former
slave of Jefferson Davis, who achieved his freedom at the age of thirty-one.

Dey all had diffe’nt ways o’ thinkin’ ’bout it. Mos’ly though dey was jus’
lak me, dey didn’ know jus’ zackly what it meant. It was jus’ somp’n dat
de white folks an’ slaves all de time talk ’bout. Dat’s all. Folks dat ain’
never been free don’ rightly know de feel of bein’ free. Dey don’ know de
T runin ’ of it. Slaves like us, what was owned by quality-folks, was sa-
ti’fied an’ didn’ sing none of dem freedom songs.

How long that sensation of shock or incredulity lasted would vary from
slave to slave. "The day we was set free,” remembered Silas Shotfore, "us
did not know what to do. Our Missus said we could stay on the place.” But
his father made one decision almost instantly: no matter what they decided
to do, they would do it somewhere else. 84

Suspicious as they might be of the white man’s pronouncements, some
blacks were initially skeptical, thinking it might all be a ruse, still another
piece of deception calculated to test their fidelity. With that in mind, some
thought it best to feign remorse at the announcement, while others needed
to determine the master’s veracity and sought confirmation elsewhere,
often in the nearest town, at the local office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or
on another plantation. When his master explained to him that he was now
a free man, Tom Robinson refused to believe him (" 'You’re jokin’ me,’ I
says”) until he spoke with some slave neighbors. "I wanted to find out if
they was free too. I just couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t believe we was all
free alike.” 85

Although most slaves welcomed freedom with varying degrees of en¬
thusiasm, the sense of confusion and uncertainty that prevailed in many
quarters was not easily dispelled. The first thought of sixteen-year-old
Sallie Crane of Arkansas was that she had been sold, and her mistress’s
reassurance that she would soon be reunited with her mother did little to
comfort her. "I cried because I thought they was carrying me to see my
mother before they would send me to be sold in Louisiana.” The impression
deliberately cultivated by some masters that the Yankees intended to sell
freed slaves to Cuba to help defray war costs may have had some impact.
No matter what they were told, a former North Carolina slave recalled of
the master’s announcement, he and his mother were simply too frightened
to leave the premises. "Jes like tarpins or turtles after ’mancipation. Jes
stick our heads out to see how the land lay.” 86

Nor did some slaves necessarily welcome the news when they fully
understood its implications for their own lives. The sorrow which some
displayed was not always pretense. To those who were reasonably satisfied
with their positions and the relations they enjoyed with the white family,
freedom offered no immediate cause for rejoicing. "I was a-farin’ pretty
well in de kitchen,” Aleck Trimble remarked. "I didn’ t’ink I eber see better
times dan what dem was, and I ain’t.” That was how Mollie Tillman also

214

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

recalled the advent of freedom, since, as she boasted, "I wam’t no common
eve’yday slave,” and her mistress refused to let her work in the fields. ”1
wuz happy den, but since ’mancipation I has jes’ had to scuffle an’ work an’
do de bes’ I kin.” To Moses Lyles, a former South Carolina slave, emancipa¬
tion undermined the mutual dependency upon which slavery had rested
and neither class benefited from the severance of those ties. "De nigger was
de right arm of de buckra class. De buckra was de horn of plenty for de
nigger. Both suffer in consequence of freedom.” 87

Standing on the porch of the Big House and watching her fellow slaves
celebrate their emancipation, Sara Brown wondered why they thought the
event worthy of such festivities. "I been free all de time,” she thought. This
insistence that they were already as free as they wanted to be repeated an
old article of faith which some slaves had recited almost habitually in
antebellum days when northern visitors pressed them on the subject of
slavery. Disillusionment and "hard times” in the post-emancipation period
helped to keep this perception of slavery alive. But for certain ex-slaves, the
attachments went much deeper, and neither "good times” nor a bountiful
freedom would most likely have altered the relationships and position they
had come to cherish. To some of the strong-willed "mammies,” whose
dominance in the white household was seldom questioned and whose pride
and self-respect remained undiminished, emancipation threatened to dis¬
rupt the only world and the only ties that really mattered to them and they
clung all the more stubbornly to the past. Even death would not undo such
relationships, as some of them anticipated a reunion in an all-white
heaven.

Who says Fse free? I wam’t neber no slabe. I libed wid qual’ty an* was
one ob de fambly. Take dis bandanna off? No, ’deedy! dats the las’ sem¬
blance Fse got ob de good ole times. S’pose I is brack, I cyan’t he’p it. If
mah mammy and pappy chose for me ter be brack, I ain’t gwine ter be
lak some white folks I knows an’ blame de Lord for all de ’dictions dat
comes ’pon ’em. I’se put up wid dis brackness now, ’cordin’ to ol’ Mis’s
Bible, for nigh on ter ninety years, an’ t’ank de good Lord, dat eberlastin’
day is mos’ come when I’ll be white as Mis’ Chloe for eber mo*! [Her
mistress had died some years before.] What’s dat, honey? How I knows
Fse gwine ter be white? Why, honey, Fse s’prised! Do you s’pose ’cause
Mammy’s face is brack, her soul is brack too? Whar’s yo* lamin’ gone to?

Many of the freed slaves who viewed emancipation apprehensively readily
confessed that they had escaped the worst aspects ofbondage. "I ain’t never
had no mother ’ceptin’ only Mis’ Patsey,” a Florida freedwoman remarked,
"an’ I ain’t never felt lak’ a bond slave what’s been pressed—dat’s what
dem soldiers say we all is.” 88

The mixed emotions with which slaves greeted their freedom also
reflected a natural fear of the unknown, along with the knowledge that
"they’s alius ’pend on Old Marse to look after them.” For many blacks, this

Slaves No More

215

was the only life they had known and the world ended at the boundaries
of the plantation. To think that they no longer had a master or mistress,
while it brought exuberance and relief to many, struck others with dismay.
"Whar we gwine eat an’ sleep?” they demanded to know. And realizing
they could not depend on the law or on other whites for protection, who
would now stand between them and the dreaded patrollers and "po’
buckra”? After hearing of their freedom, Silas Smith recalled, "de awfulest
feeling” pervaded the slave quarters that night as they contemplated a
future without masters or mistresses. "You felt jes’ like you had done
strayed off a-fishing and got lost.” Fifteen years after emancipation, Parke
Johnston, a former Virginia slave, vividly recalled "how wild and upset and
dreadful everything was in them times.”

It came so sudden on ’em they wasn’t prepared for it. Just think of whole
droves of people, that had always been kept so close, and hardly ever left
the plantation before, turned loose all at once, with nothing in the world,
but what they had on their backs, and often little enough of that; men,
women and children that had left their homes when they found out they
were free, walking along the road with no where to go . 89

Since emancipation threatened to undermine the mutual obligations
implicit in the master-slave relationship, some freed blacks responded with
cries of ingratitude and betrayal that matched in fury the similar reac¬
tions of white families to the wartime behavior of certain slaves. When
Yankee soldiers told an elderly South Carolina slave that she no longer had
a master or mistress, the woman responded as though she had been insul¬
ted: "I ain’ no free nigger! I is got a marster an’ mistiss! Dee right dar in
de great house. Ef you don’ b’lieve me, you go dar an’ see.” Like so many
of the older slaves, this woman felt that her services and devotion to
the "white folks” over many years had more than fulfilled her part of
the relationship. For the family to abandon her now and deprive her of the
security, care, and protection she clearly thought she had earned would be,
in her view, the rankest form of ingratitude. On a plantation in South
Carolina, the oldest black on the place reacted with downright indignation
when his former master read the terms of a proposed labor contract; in¬
deed, few blacks expressed the idea of mutual obligations more clearly:

Missis belonged to him, & he belonged to Missis, & he was not going to
leave her.... Massa had brought him up here to take care of him, & he
had known when Missis’ grandmother was bom & she was ’bliged to take
care of him; he was going to die on this place, & he was not going to do
any work either, except make a collar a week . 90

The uncertainties, the regrets, the anxieties which characterized
many of the reactions to emancipation underscored that pervasive sense of
dependency—the feeling, as more than one ex-slave recalled, that "we

216

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

couldn’t do a thing without the white folks.” Slavery had taught black
people to be slaves—"good” slaves and obedient workers. "All de slaves
knowed how to do hard work,” observed Thomas Cole, who had run away
to enlist in the Union Army, "but dey didn’t know nothin’ ’bout how to
’pend on demselves for de livin’.” Of course, the very logic and survival of
the "peculiar institution” had demanded that nothing be done to prepare
slaves for the possibility of freedom; on the contrary, they had been taught
to feel their incapacity for dealing with its immense responsibilities. Many
years before the war, a South Carolina jurist set forth the paternalistic
ideal when he advised that each slave should be taught to view his master
as "a perfect security from injury. When this is the case, the relation of
master and servant becomes little short of that of parent and child.” The
testimony of former slaves suggests how effectively some masters had been
able to inculcate that ideal and how the legacy of paternalism could para¬
lyze its victims . 91

Nor did Federal policies or programs in the immediate aftermath of
emancipation address themselves to this problem. Whatever the freed-
man’s desire or capacity for "living independently,” he would in scores of
instances be forced to remain dependent on his former masters. It was
precisely through such dependency, a North Carolina planter vowed, that
his class of people would be able to reestablish on the plantations what they
had ostensibly lost in emancipation, "until in a few years I think every
thing will be about as it was .” 92

Upon hearing of their freedom, some slaves instinctively deferred to
the traditional source of authority, advice, sustenance, and protection—the
master himself. Now that they were no longer his slaves, what did he want
them to do? Few freed blacks, however, no matter how confused and appre¬
hensive they may have been, were altogether oblivious to the excitement
and the anticipation that this event had generated. At the moment of
freedom, masses of slaves did not suddenly erupt in a mammoth Jubilee but
neither did they all choose to be passive, cowed, or indifferent in the face
of their master’s announcement. Outside of the prayer meetings and the
annual holiday frolics, plantation life had afforded them few occasions for
free expression, at least in the presence of their "white folks.” If only for
a few hours or days, then, many newly emancipated slaves dropped their
usual defenses, cast off their masks, and gave themselves the rare luxury
of acting out feelings they were ordinarily expected to repress.

Once they understood the full import of the master’s words, and even
then perhaps only after several minutes of stunned or polite silence, many
blacks found they could no longer contain their emotions. More impor¬
tantly, they felt no need to do so. "That the day I shouted,” was how
Richard Carruthers of Texas recalled his emancipation. Booker T. Wash¬
ington stood next to his mother during the announcement; many years
later, he could still vividly recall how she hugged and kissed him, the tears
streaming down her face, and her explanation that she had prayed many
years for this day but never believed she would live to see it. Freedom took

Slaves No More

217

longer to reach Bexar County, Texas, where the war had hardly touched
the lives and routines of the slave. But Felix Haywood, who worked as a
sheepherder and cowpuncher, recalled how ''everybody went wild” when
they learned of freedom. "We all felt like horses and nobody had made us
that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that, we was free .” 93

If neither words nor prayers conveyed the appropriate emotions, the
newly freed slaves might draw on the traditional spirituals, whose imagery
easily befitted an occasion like emancipation. The triumph had come in this
world, not in the next. The exuberance and importance of such a moment
also inspired updated versions of the spirituals and songs especially com¬
posed for the occasion. Out in Bexar County, Felix Haywood heard them
sing:

Abe Lincoln freed the nigger
With the gun and the trigger;

And I ain't goin’ to get whipped any more.

I got my ticket,

Leavin' the thicket,

And I'm a-headin' for the Golden Shore!

Harriett Gresham, who had belonged to a wealthy planter in South
Carolina, remembered hearing the guns at Fort Sumter that inaugurated
the war, as well as the song that sounded the death of slavery:

No slav'ry chains to tie me down,

And no mo' driver's ho'n to blow fer me.

No mo' stocks to fasten me down,

Jesus break slav'ry chain. Lord.

Break slav'ry chain, Lord,

Da Heben gwinter be my home.

"Guess dey made ’em up,” Annie Harris said of many of the songs she heard
in those days, " ’cause purty soon ev’ybody fo’ miles around was singin
freedom songs .” 94

Although the classic version of the Jubilee featured large masses of
people, some newly freed slaves only wanted to be alone at this moment.
Neither fear of the master nor deference to his feelings entirely explains
this preference. Overwhelmed by what they had just heard, some needed
a momentary solitude to reflect on its implications and to convince them¬
selves that it had really happened, while others simply preferred to express
themselves with the least amount of inhibition. Lou Smith recalled run¬
ning off and hiding in the plum orchard, where he kept repeating to him¬
self, "I’se free, Fse free; I ain’t never going back to Miss Jo.” After hearing
of his freedom, an elderly Virginia black proceeded to the bam, leaped from
one stack of straw to the other, and "screamed and screamed!” Although

218

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

confined to bed, Aunt Sissy, a crippled Virginia slave, heard the celebration
outside, limped out the door, and then simply stood there praying.
''Wouldn’t let nobody tetch her, wouldn’t set down. Stood dere swayin’ fum
side to side an’ singin’ over an’ over her favorite hymn.”

Oh, Father of Mercy
We give thanks to Thee
We give thanks to Thee
For thy great glory . 95

Like Aunt Sissy, many slaves viewed their deliverance as a sign of
divine intervention. God’s will had been heeded, if belatedly, and in this act
lay final proof ofHis omnipresence. Few expressed it more eloquently than
the Virginia black woman who looked upon emancipation as something
approaching a miracle. "Isn’t I a free woman now! De Lord can make
Heaven out of Hell any time, I do believe.” In addressing his Nashville
congregation, a black preacher interpreted emancipation as a result of his
people having kept the faith, even when it appeared as though there was
no hope and that the Lord had forsaken them.

We was all like de chil’en of Israel in Egypt, a cryin* and cryin’ and a
gronin’ and gronin’, and no Moses came wid de Lord’s word to order de
door broke down, dat we might walk t’rough and be free. Now de big ugly
door is broke down, bress de Lord, and we know de groans of de captive
is heard. Didn’t I tell you to pray and not to faint away, dat is not to doubt,
and dat He who opened de sea would deliber us sure, and no tanks to de
tasker massas, who would nebber let us go if dey could only hab held on
to us? But dey couldn’t—no dey couldn’t do dat, ’cause de Lord he was
wid us, and wouldn’t let us be ’pressed no more ... 96

Even as many slaves reveled in their newly proclaimed freedom, few
of them made any attempt to humiliate or unduly antagonize their newly
dispossessed owners. Appreciating this fact, some masters and mistresses
felt both grateful and immensely relieved. "Whilst glad of having free¬
dom,” Grace Elmore said of her servants, "they have never been more
attentive or more respectful than now, and seem to wish to do all in their
power to leave a pleasant impression.” That the newly emancipated slaves
had largely confined their release of emotion to a few relatively harmless
celebrations encouraged some planters to think they could ease through
the transition from bondage to freedom writh a minimum of concession and
change. Once the initial excitement subsided, they fully expected that
economic necessity if not the "old ties” and attachment to the "home”
would leave their blacks little choice but to carry on much as they had
before the war. "We may still hope for a future I think,” a prominent
Alabaman confided to his journal. Since on many plantations and farms
the day after freedom very much resembled the days that had preceded the

Slaves No More

219

master's announcement, such confidence appeared to be well founded.
Even where a Jubilee atmosphere had prevailed, the blacks were no less
appreciative of the immense problems they faced in acting on their new
status. Like the other slaves on her Texas plantation, Annie Hawkins had
shouted for joy; nevertheless, she recalled, none of them made any move
to leave "for fear old Mistress would bring us back or the pateroller would
git us ." 97

What masters and mistresses perceived as blacks fulfilling obligations
learned under the tutelage of slavery might have been viewed differently
by the former slaves themselves. In agreeing to stay until the planted crops
had been harvested or until their assigned tasks in the household had been
completed, many field hands and servants not only confirmed the freedom
of choice now available to them but also exhibited a dignity and self-respect
commensurate with their new status. Several of Grace Elmore's servants
promised to give sufficient notice before leaving so as to enable their mis¬
tress to make other arrangements. The DeSaussure family of Charleston
lost every servant but the nurse, and she agreed to stay only "as a favor
until they could hire white servants." Few freed slaves, however, thought
it necessary to emulate the attentiveness of a South Carolina woman who
prepared to leave the family she had served for thirty-six years; before
departing to join her husband and son, she made certain that all the clothes
had been washed, she distributed gifts to the white children, and she left
two of her children behind to wait on the family . 98

Despite the debilitating effects of dependency and the confusion which
persisted over the precise nature of their new status, the freedmen were
neither helpless, easily manipulated, nor frightened into passivity. Al¬
though some still deferred to the advice of the old master, many did not.
During slavery, they had often survived only by drawing on their own inner
resources, their accumulated experience, and the wisdom of those in their
own ranks to whom they looked for leadership and counsel. Upon being told
of their freedom, the blacks on many plantations retired to their quarters
to discuss the announcement, what if any alternatives were now open to
them, and the first steps they should take to test their freedom. On a
plantation in Georgia, for example, where the owner had asked his former
slaves to remain until they finished the current crop, they discussed his
proposal for the next several days before reaching a common decision.
"They wasn't no celebration 'round the place," William Hutson recalled,
"but they wasn't no work after the Master tells us we is free. Nobody leave
the place though. Not 'til in the fall when the work is through ." 99

The possibilities that suddenly presented themselves, the kinds of
questions that freedom posed, the sheer magnitude of this event in their
lives could not always be readily absorbed. Recounting his own escape to
freedom, more than two decades before the war, William Wells Brown
never forgot the strange sensations he experienced: "The fact that I was a
freeman—could walk, talk, eat and sleep as a man, and no one to stand over
me with the blood-clotted cowhide—all this made me feel that I was not

220

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

myself/’ For the newly emancipated blacks, however, most of whom chose
to remain in the same regions in which they had been slaves, the problems
they faced were far different and more formidable than those which had
confronted the fugitives upon reaching the North. Experiencing her first
days of freedom, a Mississippi woman voiced that prevailing uncertainty
as to how to give meaning to her new status: "I used to think if I could be
free I should be the happiest of anybody in the world. But when my master
come to me, and says—Lizzie, you is free! it seems like I was in a kind of
daze. And when I would wake up in the morning I would think to myself,
Is I free? Hasn’t I got to get up before daylight and go into the field to
work ?” 100

The uncertainties plagued both blacks and whites. Under slavery, the
boundaries had been clearly established and both parties understood them.
But what were the proper boundaries of black freedom? What new forms
would the relationship between a former slave and his former master now
assume? How would the freed blacks be expected to interact with free
whites? Neither the blacks nor the whites were altogether certain, though
they might have pronounced views on such matters. Now that black free¬
dom had been generally acknowledged, it needed to be defined. The state
legislatures, the courts, and the Federal government offered some direc¬
tion. But freedom could ultimately be defined only in the day-to-day lives
and experiences of the people themselves. "De day of freedom,” a former
Tennessee slave recalled, the overseer came out into the fields and told
them that they were free. "Free how?” they asked him, and he replied,
"Free to work and live for demselves .” 101 In the aftermath of emancipation,
the newly freed slaves would seek to test that response and answer the
question for themselves.

Chapter Five

HOW FREE IS FREE?

No more peck o’corn for me ,

No more, no more ,—

No more peck o’corn for me.

Many thousand go.

No more driver's lash for me.

No more, no more ,—

No more driver's lash for me,

Many thousand go.

No more pint o'salt for me.

No more, no more ,—

No more pint o'salt for me.

Many thousand go.

No more hundred lash for me,

No more, no more ,—

No more hundred lash for me.

Many thousand go.

No more mistress' call for me,

No more, no more ,—

No more mistress' call for me,

Many thousand go.

—FREEDMEN SONG, CIRCA 1865 1

What my people wants first, what dey fust wants is de right to be free.

_FREEDMAN IN SALISBURY, NORTH CAROLINA, FALL 1865 a

N ot long after hearing of their freedom, two young house servants
on a plantation in Florida, unaware that they were being overheard,
sat on the back porch one evening and exchanged thoughts about the kind
of future they envisioned for themselves. One of them, Frances, had been
a childhood gift to her equally young mistress, Martha, who had taught her
to read and write. Like so many newly emancipated slaves, Frances had her
full share of fantasies about a new life under freedom. To talk about them,
as she did with another servant, had a way of making them seem almost
real.

222

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Frances: "Bethiah, isn’t that a pretty piece Miss Martha is playing on
the piano?”

Bethiah: "I dunno. I wasn’t a-lisenin’.”

Frances: "Well, you listen, Beth. It’s such a pretty piece, and it’s a new
piece, too. But I can sing every note of it. Lieutenant Zachen-
dorf says this time next year all the white folks will be at work
in the fields, and the plantations and the houses, and every¬
thing in them will be turned over to us to do with as we please.
When that time comes I’m going straight in the parlor and
play that very piece on the piano.”

Bethiah (scoffing): "You cain’t do it—you dunno how!”

Frances: "Yes, I do, too. You’ll see—but what are you going to do?”

Bethiah: "I’se a-gwine upstairs an’ dress up in de prittiest does dey-all
is got, an’ den I’se a-gwine ter ax my beau ter walk rite in de
parler an’ set down on de white folks sofy, an’ I gwine ter pull
up one o’ dem fine cheers what we-all ain’t ’lowed ter set in,
rite long-side o’ dem an’ us ’ill lissen ter you play de pi-an-ner!”

Frances (thoughtfully): "I don’t believe I would like to see my young
lady working in the field—don’t mind about the rest of them
—but I think I’ll keep her in the house for my maid.”

Bethiah: "No, let ’em all work—it’ll do ’em good! I ’spect dey will soon
be ez black ez me when de sun teches ’em hot an’ steddy.”

Frances: "Le’s take a walk out to Camp.”

The two young women then vanished into the darkness. Several
months after their conversation, without saying anything to the former
owner, every freed slave on the plantation had left for new jobs and places.
The day on which they made their mass exodus seemed somehow appropri¬
ate: New Year's Day 1866, the third anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation. Several of them would soon return, however, their bodies
lean with hunger and ravished by disease, their expectations shattered and
their hopes deferred. Frances and Bethiah were apparently not among
them, but they, too, like so many others, were bound to discover that
"revolutions may go backward.” 3

Even as slaves, black people had often tried to conceptualize for them¬
selves a life outside of bondage and beyond the plantations and farms which
constituted the only world they knew. After learning of their freedom,
however, the conversations in the quarters, in the fields, and in the kitch¬
ens turned to alternatives that were suddenly real, to new ways of living
and working, and to aspirations they might hope to satisfy in their own
lifetimes. To talk about the possibilities could be downright exhilarating,
even infectious. But when it came to acting out these feelings, the old fears

How Free Is Free?

223

and insecurities and the still pervasive dependency on their former owners
would first have to be surmounted. That came easily for some but not for
most. "They were like a bird let out of a cage,” a Virginia freedman ex¬
plained. "You know how a bird that has been long in a cage will act when
the door is opened; he makes a curious fluttering for a little while. It was
just so with the colored people. They didn’t know at first what to do with
themselves. But they got sobered pretty soon.” That same imagery of birds
freed from a cage occurred to a white Georgian, but she could think only
of birds who were "helpless” and others, like the hawk, whose release
would most likely inflict "mischief’ on everyone. 4

The Confederacy lay in ruins. The white South, however, demon¬
strated remarkable intransigence and evinced few signs of repentance or
enlightenment. Rather than rethink their values and assumptions, most
whites preferred to romanticize about the martyred Lost Cause. Although
resigned to legal emancipation for nearly four million black men and
women, most whites clung even more tenaciously to traditional notions of
racial solidarity and black inferiority. Whatever "mischief’ emancipation
unleashed, what it could not do, as a Georgia editor suggested, was far more
crucial: it could not transform the Negro into a white man.

The different races of man, like different coins at a mint, were stamped
at their true value by the Almighty in the beginning. No contact with
other—no amount of legislation or education—can convert the ne¬
gro into a white man. Until that can be done—until you can take the
Winks out of his wool and make his skull thinner—until all these things
and abundantly more have been done, the negro cannot claim equality
with the white race.

Even the white conquerors of the South might not have thought to question
the universal wisdom of that comforting observation. The Cincinnati En¬
quirer, in fact, offered its own variant of a popular theme: "Slavery is dead,
the negro is not, there is the misfortune. For the sake of all parties, would
th&t li6 were.” 5

To what, then, could freed blacks aspire in a society dominated by
white men and women intent on using any means to perpetuate that
domination? For any freedman or freedwoman to linger too long over that
question might be both demoralizing and self-deprecating. If emancipation
by itself could touch their lives and destinies in any significant way, some
hi^lrs expressed the hope that it would turn them white. In one Virginia
household, a young servant expressed her disappointment over the fanure
of emancipation to do precisely that. Nor did the reassuring words of her
mistress—"You must not be ashamed of the skin God gave you. Your skm
is all right”—make any impression on the young woman. "I druther be
white,” she persisted. Reflecting later upon this incident, the mistress s
daughter concluded that there had been "something pathetic in the aspira¬
tion.” 6

224

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

But what this discouraged black youth had suggested, in her own
unique way, were simply the dimensions of the problem her people now
faced. Despite emancipation, she realized that to be free was not to be like
everyone else. With equal clarity, she perceived that to be white in Ameri¬
can society was to be something, perhaps everything. That was a doctrine
more fundamental and far-reaching in its implications than scores of
emancipation proclamations, constitutional amendments, legislative en¬
actments, and court decisions. George G. King, a former South Carolina
slave, knew that only too well from his own experience. Bom on a planta¬
tion appropriately called "two-hundred acres of Hell,” he had been sub¬
jected to a "devil overseer,” a "she-devil Mistress,” and a master who
"talked hard words.” He would never forget the sight of his mistress walk¬
ing away laughing while his mother screamed and groaned after a brutal
whipping. Having witnessed and endured all of this, how much could he
have expected of emancipation? His master had tried to allay any initial
misconceptions. "The Master he says we are all free,” King recalled of that
day, "but it don’t mean we is white. And it don’t mean we is equal. Just
equal for to work and earn our own living and not depend on him for no
more meats and clothes.” 7

Although emancipation left skin hues unaltered, freedmen might still
wish to fashion their aspirations and way of life after those who had always
enjoyed freedom and whose comforts, diversions, and manners they had
observed for so many years. To be free invited flights into fantasy, grandi¬
ose visions of a new life, not a life in which oppression and exploitation are
vanquished but in which the roles are reversed and the blacks find them¬
selves in the seats of power and the whites are relegated to the kitchens
and fields.

Hurrah, hurrah fer freedom!

It makes de head spin ’roun’

De nigga’ in de saddle
An’ de white man on de groun’.

After all, only a few years before, who would have thought it conceivable
that slaves would be armed and would march through the countryside to
do battle with their "masters”? Nothing seemed impossible any longer, not
even the division of the master’s lands among his former slaves. "It’s de
white man’s turn ter labor now,” an ex-slave preacher told a torch rally
near the Lester plantation in Florida, and that was as it should be.

When de white man set on de piazzy an’ de Nigger sweated in de sun_

when de white man rode it through de sand—when de Nigger made de
cotton, an’ de white man spen’ de money—now, Glory, halleluyer, dere
ain’t no marster an’ dere ain’t no slave! Glory, halleluyer! From now on,
my brudders an’ my sisters, old things have passed away an’ all things
is bekum new.

How Free Is Free?

225

The elderly slave woman in South Carolina who had welcomed the Yan¬
kees with visions of "settin’ at de white folks’ table, a eating off de white
folks’ table, and a rocking in de big rocking chair” might have witnessed
such scenes by visiting the plantations and town houses abandoned by the
owners and occupied by former slaves. Whatever had induced such visions
was less important than the way in which freed blacks chose to manifest
them. The housemaid who had experienced a lifetime of reprimands, the
field hands who knew no other routines, the urban laborers whose earnings
had been pocketed by their owners might now aspire to something differ¬
ent. After still another scolding for her alleged incompetence, a servant
finally turned on her mistress and retorted, "I expect the white folks to be
waiting on me before long!” 8

To indulge in such fantasies might be momentarily satisfying but it did
nothing to resolve the slave’s immediate predicament after emancipation.
At some point, he would have to appraise his position realistically and
define for himself the content of his freedom. After three days of "shoutin’
an’ carryin’ on,” the blacks at Wood’s Crossing, Virginia, began their first
Sunday as free men and women in a reflective mood. "We was all sittin’
roun’ restin’,” Charlotte Brown recalled, "an’ tryin’ to think what freedom
meant an’ ev’ybody was quiet an’ peaceful.” Suddenly, Sister Carrie, an
elderly black woman, began to chant:

Tain’t no mo’ sellin’ today ,

Tain’t no mo' hirin’ today,

Tain’t no pullin’ off shirts today,

It’s stomp down freedom today .

Stomp it down /

When she came to the words "Stomp it down!” the others began to shout
along with her until they finally made up music to accompany their words.
T.ik* Sister Carrie’s chant, the initial attempts to define freedom drew
largely on the most familiar images of slavery. If the future still seemed
clouded with uncertainty, what blacks had experienced as slaves remained
abundantly clear and vivid, so that freedom in its most immediate and
meaningful sense could best be understood in terms of the limitations
placed on white behavior. On the Sea Islands, slaves had interpreted the
flight of their masters as meaning "no more driver, no more cotton, no more
lickin’,” and with freedom they were "done wid massa’s hollerin’ ” and
"done wid missus’ scoldin’.” The popular wartime spiritual "Many Thou¬
sand Go” similarly dwelled on freedom as a release from the most oppres¬
sive aspects of bondage: the inadequate rations, the whippings,^ the work
routines, and the harassment—"No more peck o’com for me,” "No more
driver’s lash for me,” "No more pint o’salt for me,” "No more hundred lash
for me,” and "No more mistress’ call for me.” Even the "hard times” and
arduous labor that would characterize the postwar years in no way dimin-
ished the value ex-slaves placed on their freedom. "I’s mighty well pleased

226

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

tu git my eatin’ by de 'sweat o’ my face,’ ” a newly freed slave wrote his
brother, "an’ all I ax o’ ole masser’s tu jes’ keep he hands off o’ de Lawd
Almighty’s property, fur dot’s me. ” 9

Although former slaves chose to manifest their freedom in many
different ways, with each individual acting on his or her own set of priori¬
ties, nearly all of them could subscribe to the underlying principle that
emancipation had enabled them to become their own masters. An d those
were precisely the terms they most often employed to define their freedom.
When the earliest contrabands reached Fortress Monroe, they testified
that the most compelling idea in their minds had been "to belong to our¬
selves.” To the familiar question so often put to them as slaves, "Who do
you b’long to, boy?” a Georgia freedman responded in 1865, "Ise don’t
b’longs to nobody, Missus. Ise owns self, en b’longs to Macon.” For many
of the emancipated slaves, freedom of action—the chance "to do something
on their own account”—went to the very heart of their new condition. Not
surprisingly, few other manifestations of black freedom would prove more
irritating to their previous owners, many of whom failed to appreciate the
importance of this concept in the lives of people whose actions they had
tried so rigidly to control. " ’Twould be amusing if it were not too pitiful
to hear their idea of freedom,” sighed Grace Elmore, a South Carolina
woman, after she discussed the question with one of her servants. "I asked
Phillis if she likes the thought of being free. She said yes, tho she had
always been treated with perfect kindness and could complain of nothing
in her lot, but she had heard a woman who had bought her freedom from
kind indulgent owners, say it was a very sweet thing to be able to do as she
chose, to sit and do nothing, to work if she desired, or to go out as she liked ,
and ask nobody’s permission. And that was just her feeling. 'She wished the
power to do as she chose.’ ” l °

When asked what price tag he now bore, an Alabama freedman re¬
plied, 'I’s free. Ain’t wuf nuffin.” The northern visitor who asked the
question did so after hearing that plantation hands in the Black Belt
districts had no real understanding of freedom. Whatever remained vague
about their new status, every freedman realized that he was no longer an
article of merchandise, subject to sale at the whim, bankruptcy, or death
of his owner. He understood, too, that freedom secured his family from
involuntary disruption. If the freedman could not immediately support his
wife and children, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that any
income or property he henceforth accumulated from his labor would be his
to retain. That realization was in itself immensely gratifying. After earn¬
ing his first dollar, working on the railroad after the war, a former Arkan-
sas slave recalled that he "felt like the richest man in the world!” Even
ex-slaves who had been treated well readily appreciated this crucial differ¬
ence between bondage and freedom. "I was brought up with the white folks,
just like one of them,” declared a slave refugee who had fled to the Union

wt’j-j » 1 hands never had any hard work to do. I had a kind master;
but I didn t know but any time I might be sold away off, and when I found

How Free Is Free?

227

I could get my freedom, I was very glad; and I wouldn’t go back again,
because now I am for myself.” That same point was made by a South
Carolina freedman when a reporter asked him why he did not want to
return to a mistress who, by his own admission, had treated him well.
"Why, sar,” he explained, "all I made before was Miss Pinckney’s, but all
I make now is my own.” 11

Other than instructing them to "labor faithfully for reasonable wages”
and "to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence,” the
Emancipation Proclamation provided newly freed slaves with no real
guidelines. Nor did subsequent Federal policies provide any underpinning
for their new status. Clearly, black people were now free. But how free?
Few knew for certain, though many whites had ideas about both the quality
and the durability ofblack freedom. "These niggers will all be slaves again
in twelve months,” a Mississippi planter told a Union officer. "You have
nothing but Lincoln’s proclamation to make them free.” He had, in fact,
made a telling point. No official document by itself could turn a slave into
a free man, nor could the Yankees, the white missionary teachers, or the
most sympathetic southern whites perform that feat. To know "de feel of
bein’ free” demanded that the ex-slave begin to act like a free man, that
he test his freedom, that he make some kind of exploratory move, that he
prove to himself (as well as to others) by some concrete act that he was truly
free. The nature or the boldness of that act was far less important than the
feeling he derived from it. The action undertaken by Exter Durham of
North Carolina, for example, could hardly be described as a startling break
with the past. Upon being informed of his new status, he gathered his few
belongings together and left the Snipes Durham plantation in Orange
County for the George Herndon plantation in adjoining Chatham County.
But to Exter Durham and his wife, Tempie Herndon, who had belonged to
different masters, this move meant everything—"kaze den me an’ Exter
could be together all de time ’stead of Saturday an’ Sunday.” 12

By enlarging the freedman’s sense of what was attainable, desirable,
and tolerable, emancipation encouraged a degree of independence and
assertiveness which bondage had sharply contained. To leave the planta¬
tion without a pass, to slow the pace of work, to haggle over wages and
conditions, to refuse punishment, or to violate racial etiquette were all
ways of testing the limits of freedom. No doubt a Mississippi freedman
derived considerable satisfaction from refusing to remove his hat when
ordered to do so in the presence of a white man, as did a Richmond black
who turned down the request of a white man to help him lift a barrel,
telling him at the same time, "No, you white people think you can order
black people around as you please.” To those long accustomed to absolute
control, even the smallest exercise of personal freedom by a former slave,
no matter how innocently intended, could have an unsettling effect. 1 *

Acting as individuals and families, usually without the semblance of
organized effort, freed slaves began the arduous process of ascertaining the
boundaries of freedom. If few of them indulged in land seizures, arson, or

228

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

physical attacks on whites, this suggests that most blacks perceived the
need to exercise their freedom with some degree of appreciation for where
the power still rested in their communities. But whatever action a freed-
man deemed appropriate, no matter how restrained or insignificant it may
have appeared to others, the objective remained essentially the same—to
achieve some recognition, even if only grudgingly given, of that new sense
of dignity and self-respect which emancipation encouraged in them. Few
expressed it more graphically than an elderly freedman in South Carolina
when he explained to a black schoolteacher why he rejoiced over his new
status: "Don’t hab me feelins hurt now. Used to hab me feelins hurt all de
time. But don’t hab em hurt now, no more.” Whenever he reflected back
on slavery, Stephen McCray testified many years later, he thought invari¬
ably of the story of the coon and the dog. "The coon said to the dog: 'Why
is it you’re so fat and I am so poor, and we is both animals?’ The dog said -
'I lay round Master’s house and let him kick me and he gives me a piece
of bread right on.’ Said the coon to the dog: 'Better then that I stay poor.’
Them’s my sentiment. I’m lak the coon. I don’t believe in ’buse.” 14

To dwell only on the most dramatic manifestations of freedom would
distort the experience entirely. If a former slave should decide, for exam¬
ple, to change his employer, that might simply entail a move from his old
plantation to the next one down the road. This was not about to alter in
any significant degree his day-to-day life but to many a freedman, as to
Ambus Gray of Alabama, that had been the "one difference” between
freedom and bondage: "You could change places and work for different
men.” Even if a slave chose to stay with his master after emancipation,
even if his demeanor remained unchanged, even if his fidelity to the "white
folks” stood u nsh a k en, this did not necessarily mean that nothing had
happened to him or that he failed to grasp the meaning of his freedom.
"When you’all had de power you was good to me,” an elderly black man
told his former master in May 1865, "and I’ll protect you now. No niggers
nor Yankees shall touch you. If you want anything, call for Sambo. I m^nn
call for Mr. Samuel—that’s my name now.” 15

To determine the "one difference” between freedom and bondage, the
ex-slaves found themselves driven in many directions at the same time. But
the distance they placed between themselves and their old status could not
be measured by how far they traveled or even if they left the old plantati on
That "difference” could most often be perceived in the choices now avail¬
able to them, in the securing of families and the location of loved ones who
had been sold away, in the sanctification of marital ties, in the taking 0 f
a new surname or the revelation of an old one, in the opportunity to achieve
literacy, in the chance to move their religious services from "down in the
hollow. to their own churches, in sitting where they pleased in public
places, in working where the rewards were commensurate with their labor.
What emancipation introduced into the lives of many black people was not
only the element of choice but a leap of confidence in the ability to effect
changes in their own lives without deferring to whites. "What I likes bes,

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229

to be slave or free?” Margrett Nillin, a former Texas slave, pondered over
that question many decades after her emancipation. "Well, it’s dis way,”
she answered. "In slavery I owns nothin’ and never owns nothin’. In free¬
dom I’s own de home and raise de family. All dat cause me worryment and
in slavery I has no worryment, but I takes de freedom.” 16

Nothing exhilarated Charlie Barbour more in the aftermath of emanci¬
pation than to know "dat I won’t wake up some mornin’ ter fin’ dat my
mammy or some ob de rest of my family am done sold.” With even more
vivid memories, Jacob Thomas, who had seen his parents separated by sale,
had no difficulty many decades later in relating what for him had been the
overriding significance of freedom: "I has got thirteen great-gran’ chilluns
an’ I knows whar dey ever’one am. In slavery times dey’d have been on de
block long time ago.” For the tens of thousands of slaves who had been
involuntarily separated from their loved ones, freedom raised equally ex¬
citing prospects. Rather than have to wait for the heavenly reunions they
had sung about, they might anticipate seeing each other again in this
world. To William Curtis, a former Georgia slave whose father had been
sold to a Virginia planter, "dat was de best thing about de war setting us
free, he could come back to us.” 17

Few scenes acted out in the post-emancipation South exceeded the
drama, the emotion, the poignancy that marked the reunions of families
which had been torn asunder by slavery. The last time Ben and Betty
Dodson had seen each other, they had begged their master to sell them
together; twenty years passed before the couple met again—in a refugee
camp. "Glory! glory! hallelujah,” Ben Dodson shouted as he alternated
between embracing his wife and stepping back to reassure himself that it
was really she. "Dis is my Betty, shuah. I foun’ you at las’. I’s hunted an’
hunted till I track you up here. I’s boun’ to hunt till I fin’ you if you’s alive.”
In many such reunions, the passage of time and the effects of bondage made
recognition nearly impossible. Not until the woman at the door removed
her hat and the bundle she carried on her head did a young Tennessee
freedwoman discern the scar on her face, and only then did she know for
certain that she was gazing upon her mother, whom she had not seen since
childhood. In a Virginia refugee camp, a mother found her daughter, now
eighteen years old, who had been sold away from her when only an infant.
"See how they’ve done her bad,” the mother declared to anyone who would
listen. "See how they’ve cut her up. From her head to her feet she is scarred
just as you see her face.” 18

Each reunion had its own incredible story, revealing the extraordinary
resourcefulness with which husbands and wives, parents and children,
brothers and sisters sought each other out in the immediate aftermath of

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Union occupation and emancipation. Family members embarked on these
searches, a much-impressed Freedmen’s Bureau officer reported, "with an
ardor and faithfulness sufficient to vindicate the fidelity and affection of
any race—the excited joys of the regathering being equalled only by the
previous sorrows and pains of separation.” The attempts freedmen ma A*
to relocate loved ones forcefully belied the commonly held theories about
a race of moral cripples who placed little value on marital and familial ties.
Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists subscribed to these theories,
attributing the blacks’ moral insensibility, "licentiousness,” and "false
ideas touching chastity” to the evil influences of bondage. Like most whites,
they tended to underestimate the depth of familial love and emotional
attachment that induced so many former slaves to make the location of
relatives their first priority after emancipation. "They had a passion, not
so much for wandering, as for getting together,” a Freedmen’s Bureau
agent in South Carolina wrote of the postwar migrations of blacks; "and
every mother’s son among them seemed to be in search of his mother; every
mother in search of her children. In their eyes the work of emancipation
was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery
were reunited.” In North Carolina, a northern journalist encountered a
middle-aged freedman—"plodding along, staff in hand, and apparently
very footsore and tired”—who had already walked nearly six hundred
miles in his determination to reach the wife and children he had been sold
away from four years before. 19

Although viewed as a post-emancipation phenomenon, the attempt to
reunite with loved ones actually represented an ongoing impulse that had
frequently manifested itself in the antebellum period. Except for punish¬
ment, no other factor had accounted for as many runaway slaves; indeed,
a significant number of such escapes came immediately after a master had
sold a spouse, a parent, or a child. 20 Equally important, the strong commit¬
ment to family ties had kept thousands of slaves from resorting to flight.
Emancipation made the search for lost relatives less perilous, though not
necessarily more successful. Where contact had been maintain ^ during
the period of separation, either through letters or the "grapevine,” re¬
unions were effected with little difficulty. The wartime contraband camps,
by bringing together thousands of uprooted and "runaway” slaves, pro¬
vided valuable information about separated families and reunited many of
them.

For countless numbers of freed slaves, however, the attempt to find lost
relatives became an arduous, time-consuming, and frustrating faslr, requir¬
ing long and often fruitless treks into unfamiliar country, the patience to
track down every clue and follow up every rumor, and the determination
to stay on a trail even when it suddenly appeared to vanish. "Dey was heaps
of nigger families dat I know what was sep’rated in de time of bondage dat
tried to find dey folkses what was gone,” Tines Kendricks recalled. "But de
mostest of ’em never git togedder ag’in even after dey sot free ’cause dey
don’t know where one or de other is.” Of the "dozens of children” Jennie

How Free Is Free?

231

Hill knew who searched for parents "sold 'down the river/ ” as well as
parents who looked frantically for their children, she could remember only
one case in which the family was reunited. "Some perhaps were killed in
the battles but in the majority of the cases the children of slaves lost their
identity when they were taken from the place of their birth into a new
county.” Martha Showvely, who was twenty-eight years old at the time of
emancipation, had not seen her mother since they were separated by sale
in 1846. After the war, she reached the county where her mother report¬
edly resided, only to learn that death had claimed her life three years
earlier. The efforts to reunite with loved ones sometimes involved risks
other than disappointment over failure. Hoping to find any members of his
family, James Curry ventured back to the county in North Carolina from
which he had escaped more than twenty years before the war; whether
provoked by his earlier escape or by his association with northern aboli¬
tionists, enraged local whites assaulted him. 21

Despite herculean efforts, the prospects for a successful reunion re¬
mained slim. Many years had passed since relatives had last seen each
other and inevitable changes had altered physical appearances. The
searcher usually carried with him only a visual image of what a spouse, a
child, or a parent had looked like numerous years, even decades, earlier. No
sooner had a missionary teacher in South Carolina returned from a trip to
Virginia than an elderly black woman tearfully pleaded for any informa¬
tion she might have gathered about the whereabouts of her daughter.

As soon as she heard I had travelled through Virginia, she came to me
to know if I had ever seen her "little gal.” ... And she begged me to look
out for her when I went back. She was sure I should know her, she "was
such a pretty little gal.” It was useless to tell her the girl was now a
woman, and doubtless had children of her own. She always had been and
always would be her "baby .” 22

The Freedmen’s Bureau did what it could to help, acting as a clearing¬
house of information and providing free transportation in some cases; at
the same time, northern teachers and missionaries, many of them sta¬
tioned in the contraband camps, frequently spent entire days writing let¬
ters for ex-slaves who were trying to make contact with a relative,
invariably on the basis of the scantiest information. "Ellen Cummins; least
dat was her name, w’en dey dun toted her off to Florida,” an elderly black
woman replied when asked for the address of her daughter, who had been
sold away from her twenty years before at the age of four. Upon learning
that his brother, whom he had not seen for twenty years, was in Virginia,
a Mississippi freedman immediately dictated a letter in the hope of effect¬
ing an early reunion.

I’s gwine tu buy a lot, an’ build me a hut on it; an’ den, Jack, you is wanted
down yere, tu see you’ ole brudder. Fur de last time he seed you, he wuz

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

standin’ on de auction block, an’ Mass’r Bill was a turnin’ he round, like
a ’possum on de spit, so’s de driber’d see me fa’r an’ squar’. Neber min’,
Jack. I’s tryin’ tu let by-gones go, an’ jes’ look out fur number one; an’ I’s
powerful glad I’s a free man now, for shore. Come a Christmas, ef ve kin
Jack. 23

If the initial efforts proved unsuccessful, the search for family mem¬
bers might span several decades. Until well into the 1870s and 1880s, the
newly established black newspapers, both in the South and in the North,
abounded with advertisements in which relatives requested any informa¬
tion that might assist them. If physical descriptions were given at all, they
tended to be sparse and badly outdated; more often, famil y members had
to content themselves with listing whatever leads they had accumulated
over the years about the location of loved ones.

Information Wanted, of Caroline Dodson, who was sold from Nashville,

Nov. 1st, 1862, by James Lumsden to Warwick, (a trader then in human
beings), who carried her to Atlanta, Georgia, and she was last heard of
in the sale pen of Robert Clarke, (human trader in that place), from which
she was sold. Any information of her whereabouts will be thankfully
received and rewarded by her mother. Lucinda Lowery, Nashville.

$200 Reward. During the year 1849, Thomas Sample carried away from
this city, as his slaves, our daughter, Polly, and son, Geo. Washington, to
the State of Mississippi, and subsequently, to Texas, and when last heard
from they were in Lagrange, Texas. We win give $100 each for t h e m to
any person who will assist them, or either of them, to get to Nashville,
or get word to us of their whereabouts, if they are alive. Ben. & Flora
East.

Sami. Dove wishes to know of the whereabouts of his mother, Areno, his
sisters Maria, Neziah, and Peggy, and his brother Edmond, who were
owned by Geo. Dove, of Rockingham county, Shenandoah Valley, Va.

Sold in Richmond, after which Sami, and Edmond were taken to Nash¬
ville, Tenn., by Joe Mick; Areno was left at the Eagle Tavern,

Respectfully yours, Sami. Dove, Utica, New York. 24

Not only had physical features changed in the intervening years but
new loyalties and emotional commitments had often replaced the old. Hus¬
bands and wives who had given up any hope of seeing each other again
were apt to have remarried, and children sold away from their parents had
been raised by other black women or by the white mistresses, creating
innumerable post-emancipation complications. Even if the search for fam¬
ily members succeeded, then, the reunions might be less than joyous occa¬
sions, and some couples who had remarried thought it best to avoid seeing
each other again. Few revealed the emotional torment raised by such
problems more graphically than the husband of Laura Spicer. Several
years after their forced separation, he had remarried in the belief that his

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233

wife had died. When he learned after the war that she was still alive, the
news stung him, prompting both joy and remorse. "I read your letters over
and over again,” he wrote her. "I keep them always in my pocket. If you
are married I don’t ever want to see you again.” But in other letters, he
revised that hasty warning and urged her to remarry. "I would much
rather you would get married to some good man, for every time I gits a
letter from you it tears me all to pieces. The reason why I have not written
you before, in a long time, is because your letters disturbed me so very
much.” Even as he urged her to find another man, however, he professed
his undying love for her.

I would come and see you but I know you could not bear it. I want to see
you and I don’t want to see you. I love you just as well as I did the last
day 1 saw you, and it will not do for you and I to meet. I am married, and
my wife have two children, and if you and I meets it would make a very
dissatisfied family.

Although they did not see each other, the correspondence continued. He
requested her to send him locks of the children’s hair with their names
attached. He again urged her to remarry, if only for the sake of the chil¬
dren. But whatever she did, he insisted, their love for each other would
remain undiminished.

You know it never was our wishes to be separated from each other, and
it never was our fault. Oh, I can see you so plain, at any-time, I had rather
anything to had happened to me most than ever have been parted from
you and the children. As I am, I do not know which I love best, you or
Anna. If I was to die, today or tomorrow, I do not think I would die
satisfied till you tell me you will try and marry some good, smart man
that will take good care of you and the children; and do it because you
love me; and not because I think more of the wife I have got than I do
of you. The woman is not bom that feels as near to me as you do. Tell
them [the children] they must remember they have a good father and one
that cares for them and one that thinks about them every day.

My very heart did ache when reading your very kind and interesting
letter. Laura I do not think that I have change any at all since I saw you
last—I thinks of you and my children every day of my life. Laura I do love
you the same. My love to you never have failed. Laura, truly, I have got
another wife, and I am very sorry, that I am. You feels and seems to me
as much like my dear loving wife, as you ever did Laura. 25

Perhaps as tragic were the "reunions” in which marital partners ac¬
cused each other of betrayal, infidelity, and desertion since their forced
separation. After four years of absence, a freedman in North Carolina
located his wife, only to find that she had borne two children by her master.
Refusing to support the children, the husband took the case to the Freed-
men’s Bureau in Raleigh, which decided that the woman in such cases

234

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

could name the father and force him to assume paternal responsibility and
support. "This decision is not yet generally known,” a reporter noted, "but
when it is I fancy that it will create quite a flutter.” Near Woodville,
Mississippi, Fanny Smart learned that her husband, Adam, whom she had
presumed to be dead, was still alive. Although not displeased by this news,
she had been hurt by his failure to contact her earlier and by his apparent
indifference to the children he had fathered.

I received your letter yesterday. I was glad to hear from you. I heard that
you was dead. I now think very strange, that you never wrote to me
before. You could not think much of your children, as for me , I dont
expect you to think much of as I have been confined, just got up, have a
fine daughter ,... I expect to stay here this year. I have made a contract
to that effect. I am doing very well. My children I have all with me, they
are all well, and well taken care of, the same as ever, if one get sick, they
are well nursed. I now have eight children, all dependent on me for a
support, only one, large enough to work for herselfe, the rest I could not
hire for their victuals and clothes. I think you might have sent the
children something, or some money. Joe can walk and talk. Ned is a great
big boy, bad as ever. My baby I call her Cassinda. The children all send
howda to you they all want to see you.

The circumstances surrounding their separation may have accounted for
Adam Smart’s failure to contact his wife earlier, perhaps even for the
rumor that he had died. At least, the man who had been his master sug¬
gested as much in the postscript he added to Fanny Smart’s letter.

Adam you have acted the damn rascal with me in ever way you trid to
make the Yanks distroy ever thing I had I know worn you to neve put
you foot on my place i think you a nary raskal after this yer you can
send an git you your famley if they want to go with you. 26

Far more serious complications were introduced into postwar reunions
by masters who had insisted that their slaves have marital partners, re¬
gardless of compatibility or depth of affection, and who had forbidden
interplantation relationships. On some plantations, "marriages” were
forced upon men and women who had spouses in other places from whom
they had been separated by sale. Stephen Jordon, a former Louisiana slave
who had been sold away from both his mother and his wife, found himself
in such a predicament.

I myself had my wife on another plantation. The woman my master gave
me had a husband on another plantation. Every thing was mixed up. My
other wife had two children for me, but the woman master gave me had
no children. We were put in the same cabin, but both of ue cried, me for
my old wife and she for her old husband. As I could read and write I used
to write out passes for myself, so I could go and see my old wife; and I

How Free Is Free?

235

wrote passes for the other men on the place, so they could go and see then-
wives that lived off the place.

Even as Jordon and his second wife shared the same cabin, he wrote out
passes that enabled her to slip out and visit her husband on a nearby
plantation. When conditions "got to be so tight” that he could no longer see
his wife as often as he wished, Jordon resolved to escape. Upon being
apprehended, however, he was sold even further away from his wife until
finally both of them remarried "during the long years of our enforced and
hopeless separation.” 27

Where husbands and wives had lived on separate but nearby planta¬
tions, their marital relationship rested on the willingness of two masters
to permit weekend visitations. Understandably, as a former South Carolina
slave explained, "a man dat had a wife off de place, see little peace or
happiness. He could see de wife once a week, on a pass, and jealousy kep’
him ’stracted de balance of de week, if he love her very much.” Such
relationships, recalled Millie Barber, whose parents had lived five miles
apart, often produced "confusion, mix-up, and heartaches.”

My pa have to git a pass to come to see my mammy. He come sometimes
widout de pass. Patrollers catch him way up de chimney hidin’ one night;
they stripped him right befo’ mammy and give him thirty-nine lashes,
wid her cryin’ and a hollerin’ louder than he did.

After emancipation, husbands and wives who had lived in this manner
quickly seized the opportunity to spend more than weekends together and
settled down, usually, on one or the other place. 28

Upon learning of their freedom, a former slave recalled, the older
blacks "knowed what it meant, but us young ones didn’t.” Many of them
would learn soon enough, often in ways that proved to be quite memorable
and traumatic. Husbands and wives not only located each other in the
aftermath of emancipation but made what one Federal officer described as
"superhuman efforts” to find the children who had been sold away from
them; indeed, numerous ex-slaves would recall that their first realization
of freedom came when a parent, a sibling, or an aunt or uncle suddenly
appeared to take them away. 29 Depending on the circumstances of their
separation, such reunions could result in outbursts of unbounded joy or
produce very mixed emotions, particularly in young blacks who had little
or no recollection of their parents. Having been raised by someone else, to
whom firm emotional commitments may have been made, the sudden ap¬
pearance of a strange man or woman who claimed to be a father or mother
was a terribly confusing and agonizing moment, even more so if faced with
the prospect of separation from those they had grown to love.

Since infancy, when her mother had been sold away, Frankie Goole
had been reared by her white mistress, slept in the same room with her,
and she came to regard her with considerable affection. At the age of

236

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

twelve, with the war over, Frankie found herself in a courtroom standing
next to a woman who claimed to be her mother and facing a judge who
asked her to verify it. "I dunno, she sezs she ez,” Frankie remembered
having told him. Reflecting back on that moment many years later, she
summed up the confusion she had felt: "W’at did I know ob a m a mmy dat
wuz tuk fum me at six weeks ole.” When Harriet Clemens fled a plantation
in Mississippi before the war ("It was on ’count o’ de Nigger overseers. Dey
kep’ a-tryin’ to mess ’roun’ wid her an’ she wouldn’ have nothin’ to do wid
’em”), she left her small child in the care of an elderly woman addressed
as Aunt Emmaline, who "kep’ all de orphunt chillun an’ dem who’s mam¬
mas had been sent off to de breedin’ quarters.” As soon as the war ended,
she returned to claim her daughter. "At firs’ I was scared o’ her, ’cause I
didn’ know who she was,” the daughter recalled. "She put me in her lap
an’ she mos’ nigh cried when she seen de back o’ my head. Dey was awful
sores where de lice had been an’ I had scratched ’em. She sho’ jumped Aunt
Emmaline Ixtut dat. Us lef dat day .. .” 30

On some plantations, the mistress had made a practice of selecting
certain young slaves and moving them into the Big House to train them
to be maids. Sarah Debro, a former North Carolina slave, recalled being
separated from her mother for that purpose. "De day she took me my
mammy cried kaze she knew I would never be ’lowed to live at de cabin wid
her no more.” While life in the Big House had both advantages and disad¬
vantages, depending on the moods of the "white folks,” the impressions it
made on a young slave could be incalculable.

My dresses an’ aprons was starched stiff. I had a clean apron every day.

We had white sheets on de beds an’ we niggers had plenty to eat too, even
ham. When Mis’ Polly went to ride she took me in de carriage wid her.

De driver set way up high an’ me an’ Mis’ Polly set way down low_I

loved Mis’ Polly an’ loved stayin’ at de big house.

After the war, her mother immediately came to claim her. But Sarah
refused to leave, crying and holding on to the dress of her mistress, who
pleaded for the right to retain her. Despite the tears and pleas, Sarah’s
mother remained firm and reminded the mistress that only her callousness
had made this scene possible. "You took her away from me an’ didn’ pay
no mind to my cryin’, so now I’se takin’ her back home. We’s free now, Mis’
Polly, we ain’t gwine be slaves no more to nobody.” With those words, she
dragged her daughter out of the house. "I can see how Mis’ Polly looked
now,” Sarah Debro recollected. "She didn’ say nothin’ but she looked hard
at Mammy an’ her face was white.” That night, in the windowless "mud
house” to which they moved, Sarah lay on her straw mattress and looked
up through the cracks in the roof. "I could see de stars, an’ de sky shinin’
through de cracks looked like long blue splinters stretched ’cross de rafters.
I lay dare an’ cried kaze I wanted to go back to Mis’ Polly.” 31

The close relationships that sometimes developed between slave chil-

How Free Is Free?

237

dren and the white mistress could be even more psychologically damaging
than separation by sale. Where a master or mistress made "pets” out of
certain favorites, indulging them in ways their parents could not, a conflict
of loyalties became highly possible. Jane Sutton, a former Mississippi slave,
contrasted her master, who provided the blacks with "plenty feat an’
wear” and gave the children candy and presents when he returned from
town, with her father, who belonged to a neighboring planter and visited
on weekends. "He jus’ come on Satu’d’y night an’ us don’ see much of ’im.
Us call him 'dat man.’ Mammy toP us to be more ’spectful to ’im ’cause he
was us daddy, but us aint care nothin’ ’bout ’im. He aint never brung us
no candy or nothin’.” Rather than live with her father after emancipation,
Jane ran away and returned to the old plantation. With equally conflicting
emotions, Lizzie Hill, who had been a slave in Alabama, ran away from her
mother three times after the war in order to return to the plantation where
she had been accorded the same food and clothes as the white children with
whom she had played and slept. Nor could Lou Turner easily give up the
life she had led as a young slave on a Texas plantation, where the mistress
had fed her well, dressed her in nice clothes, and insisted on her sleeping
in the same room. "Old missy have seven li’l nigger chillen what belong to
her slaves, but dey mammies and daddys come git ’em. I didn’t own my own
mammy. I own my old missy and call her 'mama.’ Us cry and cry when us
have to go with us mammy.” 32

But for most young blacks and children, slavery had been something
less than a playground. The examples of brutal treatment, abuse, and
neglect were no mere figments of the abolitionist imagination. If some
absorbed the cultural ethos of the white family from constant contact with
it, the vast majority of black children formed their view of the world in the
quarters and usually within their own family groupings. More often than
not, the child’s teacher, school, and family were all the same, and the
values and warnings with which he or she was inculcated reflected the
experience of parents and grandparents who had themselves learned these
lessons in the same way. In the absence of parents, the child was still more
likely to obtain the love and learning he needed from other blacks than
from his "white folks.” 33 Not only did many black youths embrace the
chance to sever the ties with their master and mistress but those who had
been separated from loved ones often took the initiative to find them. After
learning of her freedom in 1863, for example, Mary Armstrong, a seven-
teen-year-old Missouri youth, went in search of her mother, who had been
sold and taken to Texas. Several years later, she tracked her down in
Wharton County. "Law me, talk ’bout cryin’ and singin’ and cryin’ some
more, we sure done it,” she recalled of their reunion. Whatever the wishes
of parents or children, some dispossessed masters insisted on keeping the
young blacks until the age of twenty-one. The various state apprenticeship
laws came close to legalized kidnapping in many instances, depriving par¬
ents of children if a white judge deemed it "better for the habits and
comfort” of a child to be bound out to a white guardian. Protests over

238

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

arbitrary apprenticeship mounted in the postwar years, with parents fre¬
quently appealing to the local provost marshal or the Freedmen’s Bureau
for custodial rights to their children. 34

Few memories of bondage elicited greater pain in black parents than
the humiliation they had suffered in watching their children whipped or
abused by a member of the white family. After emancipation, if they de¬
cided to remain with the same master or if they hired out elsewhere,
freedmen families often made their labor contingent on the abolition of
such practices and a recognition of their exclusive right to manage and
discipline their own children. Employers who violated that understanding
were apt to find themselves with fewer laborers the next morning or when
the time came to renew a contract. With equal fervor, parents committed
themselves in the immediate aftermath of emancipation to provide an
education for their children, not only in the numerous schools established
by northern whites but in schools which employers were forced to establish
on their plantations in order to retain and attract a labor force.

Deprived of any legal standing, stripped of any means to protect itself,
faced always with the specter of forced breakup, the black family under
slavery needed to demonstrate remarkable resiliency to withstand the
often debilitating and debasing experience of white ownership. While some
slaveholders recognized and encouraged strong family ties for the stabiliz¬
ing influence they exerted, many others were either indifferent, thought
their blacks to be emotionally incapable of sustaining the necessary affec¬
tion, or resented any attempts by them to ape the social norms of their
superiors. "I was once whipped,” a black servant in New Orleans re¬
marked, "because I said to missis, 'My mother sent me/ We were not
allowed to call our mammies 'mother/ It made it come too near the way
of the white folks.” Whatever the prevailing attitudes of individual masters
or mistresses, every black family had to find ways to counter the sense of
powerlessness imparted by white ownership. Not only did they lack control
over separation by sale but the people who owned them were free to inflict
indignities, both physical and verbal, as their moods dictated, and they
were apt to do so in the presence of the entire family. To calculate the
brutalities of the "peculiar institution” by counting the number of whip¬
pings meted out by a master or overseer would be to miss the point al¬
together, as nearly every slave who wrote about his or her experience
would testify. 35

Although some slave families were disrupted, by irreparable psychic
damage if not by sale, what seems so remarkable is that most of them
endured the experience of bondage. On most plantations and farms, the
lives of the slaves—field hands, house servants, and artisans alike—re¬
volved around family units, the two-parent household predominated, and
the black husband and father exerted in his own way the dominant influ¬
ence in that household. If he could not always provide for his family as he
wished, he tried to supplement their diets by hunting, fishing, and theft.
If he could not always protect his family as he wished, he often managed

How Free Is Free?

239

to lay down a line of tolerated behavior beyond which masters and over¬
seers proceeded at their own risk. Sam Watkins, a Tennessee planter, was
among those who flagrantly crossed that line once too often.

He would ship their husbands (slaves) out of bed and get in with their
wives. One man said he stood it as long as he could and one morning he
just stood outside, and when he got with his wife he just choked him to
death. He said he knew it was death, but it was death anyhow; so he just
killed him. They hanged him. 36

Few wives expected their husbands to sacrifice their lives in this way. Fully
aware of the master’s power, most couples made the necessary accommoda¬
tion. That reflected not indifference to family ties but the simple resolve
to keep the family together and alive. The same consideration would im¬
pede escape until the proximity of the Union Army enabled entire families
to leave the plantations.

During the Civil War, the black family had to withstand attacks from
various sources. Numbers of slaves who accompanied their masters to the
front lines never returned, nor did many of those impressed into Confeder¬
ate labor battalions. "Father wus sent to Manassas Gap at the beginning
of de war,” a former Virginia slave recalled, "and I do not ’member ever
seein’ him.” When freedmen attempted to trace lost family members after
emancipation, the trail often started and ended with the information that
he was last seen in "a gang [that] was taken away de firs year of de war.”
The wartime decisions to remove slaves to Texas or to some "safe” place
in the interior resulted in still further disruptions, with the women, chil¬
dren, and elderly blacks often left on the old place. Nor did the coming of
the Union Army necessarily secure black families; instead, some of the
men enlisted or were forcibly impressed into service as military laborers
and soldiers. Whatever the commitment of slaves to the Union cause, many
of them feared that service in the Union Army would place their wives and
children in immediate jeopardy from hostile whites and deprive them of
necessary support. Such fears were not illusory. Enraged over losing any
of their slaves, particularly to the Union Army, masters were known to
avenge themselves on the soldiers’ wives and children, either by abusing
them, refusing to support them, or expelling them from the premises. Only
after strong pressure from black soldiers who threatened mutiny and de¬
sertion did the Federal government belatedly guarantee freedom to the
families of black volunteers, make them eligible for rations, and try to
ensure their safety. By this time, however, numerous families had already
been disrupted. 37

When weighed against the enormous tensions to which slave marital
ties were subjected, the prospects for success under any circumstances
might have seemed dim. The very words by which marriages were solem¬
nized indicated their vulnerability. "Don’t mean nothin’ less you say,
'What God done jined, cain’t no man pull asunder,’ ” a former Virginia

240

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

slave observed. "But dey never would say dat. Jus’ say, 'Now you mar¬
ried/ ” The classic account of the slave preacher in Kentucky who united
couples "until death or distance do you part” had its equivalent in the
Virginia master who, as one of his former slaves recalled, devised his own
marriage vows by which he united slave couples:

Dat yo 3 wife
Dat yo’ hushan'

Ise yo ' Marser
She yo'Missus
You're married.

If they achieved nothing else, the mock wedding rites, highlighted by
"jumping the broomstick,” sanctioned such marriages in the eyes of the
man and woman and their fellow slaves. But the white owner determined
the longevity of their relationship, and the forcible breakup of slave mar¬
riages occurred with sufficient regularity to warrant the casualness of the
ceremony, the fears of the couple, and some bitter recollections:

One night a couple married an’ de next mornin’ de boss sell de wife. De
gal ma got in de street an* cursed de white woman fur all she could find.

She said: "dat damn white, pale-face bastard sell my daughter who jus’
married las’ night,” an other t’ings.

The police had to be summoned to restrain the grief-stricken mother and
remove her to the local workhouse . 38

No sooner had emancipation been acknowledged than thousands of
"married” couples, with the encouragement of black preachers and north¬
ern white missionaries, hastened to secure their marital vows, both legally
and spiritually. "My husband and I have lived together fifteen years,” the
mother of a large family remarked, "and we wants to be married over again
now.” Mildred Graves, a former Virginia house servant, remembered her
courtship, the broomstick ceremony, and the cast-off dress her mistress
gave her as a wedding present; nevertheless, after the war, she also re¬
called, "we had a real sho’ miff weddin’ wid a preacher. Dat cost a dollar .” 39
The insistence of teachers, missionaries, and Freedmen’s Bureau officers
that blacks formalize their marriages stemmed from the notion that legal
sanction was necessary for sexual and moral restraint and that ex-slaves
had to be inculcated with "the obligations of the married state in civilized
life.” But many of the couples themselves, who needed no instruction in
such matters, agreed to participate in formalizations of their unions for
more practical reasons—to legitimize their children, to qualify for soldiers’
pensions, to share in the rumored forthcoming division of the lands, and
to exercise their newly won civil rights. Whatever the most compelling
reason, mass wedding ceremonies involving as many as seventy couples at
a time became a common sight in the postwar South.

How Free Is Free?

241

One evening four couples came to the schoolhouse to meet "the parson”
who was to perform the marriage ceremony for them. They came straight
from the field, in their working-clothes; the women, as was their custom,
walking behind the men.... When they left the schoolhouse the women
all took their places by the side of the men, showing that they felt they
were equal in the eyes of the law . 40

Native whites looked upon these spectacles with a mixture of amuse¬
ment, disdain, and indifference. Having forbidden legal marriages, con¬
doned the breakup of families, and demeaned family relationships, some
former masters and mistresses now mocked the efforts of ex-slaves to dig¬
nify with proper ceremony and affidavit marital ties of long standing.
'They take the white man’s notions as they copy his manners, not for what
they are but for the impression that’s made by them on the world,” a South
Carolina white woman observed of the interest taken by blacks in solemniz¬
ing their marriage relationship.

Now what [is] more common than to hear "I must go with my wife,” not
because they have investigated the matter and seen the right of the
thing, but such is the view of the white and the view suits present circum¬
stances, and is therefore adopted by the negro. One wife is as good as
another to them ...

Like most whites, she seemed incapable of explaining the actions of the
freedmen except as a desire to imitate their superiors—and moral exem¬
plars. Even the northern missionaries, who liked to think of themselves as
rescuing the ex-slaves from the sins of concubinage, shared many of the
prevailing assumptions about the moral depravity of blacks. Nevertheless,
white Southerners and northern observers alike would hardly have dis¬
agreed with the potential benefits that flowed from stable black families.
"Marital relations are invaluable as a means of promoting industry,” a
northern correspondent wrote from Louisiana. "Morality encourages in¬
dustry and prosperity. Immorality in the sexual relations produces idle¬
ness, intemperance, and apathy .” 41

Not all slave couples hastened to legalize their marriages, at least not
until they resolved the many complications stemming from multiple liai¬
sons in a lifetime of bondage. The question facing numerous freedmen and
freedwomen was not whether to formalize their slave marriage but which
one should take precedence. With numerous spouses having remarried
since their forced separation, that would frequently be a difficult and ago¬
nizing decision to make. Nor could they resolve the dilemma, as a South
Carolina woman attempted to do, by alternating between two spouses on
separate plantations. Newly enacted state laws usually validated unions
between persons of color who were living together at the time of emancipa¬
tion and required ex-slaves with multiple spouses to make an immediate
decision about which "marriage” they wished to legitimate; Federal au-

242

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

thorities, who tended to take these matters more seriously, recognized the
right of a husband or wife to leave a childless marriage to return to a
previous partner by whom they had had children. "Whenever a negro
appears before me with two or three wives who have equal claim upon
him,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in North Carolina reported, "I marry
him to the woman who has the greatest number of helpless children who
otherwise would become a charge on the Bureau .” 42

Although black preachers, white missionaries, and Bureau officials
helped some couples to resolve these difficulties, the final decision was
generally made by the partners themselves, who would have to reconcile
conflicting emotions compounded by the manner in which they had ini¬
tially been separated and the presence of children. In the District of Colum¬
bia, for example, a man who had been separated from his first wife for
twenty-two years resolved to annul his present marriage "and live with the
first by whom he has several grown children.” On the Sea Islands, Jane
Ferguson, after hearing that her first husband had returned, had no hesita¬
tion in making a decision. "Martin Barnwell is my husband, ma’am,” she
told a missionary teacher. "I am got no husband but he. W’en de secesh sell
him off we nebber ’spect to see each odder more. He said, 'Jane take good
care of our boy, an’ w’en we git to hebben us will lib togedder to nebber part
no more.’ ” When she subsequently married Ferguson, they had agreed
that Martin’s return would annul their ties. "I told him I never ’spects
Martin could come back, but if he did he would be my husband above all
others.” But what if Ferguson refused to give her up? the teacher asked
her. "Martin is my husband, ma’am, an’ the father of my child,” the
woman replied; "and Ferguson is a man” But the matter was not so
easily resolved, as Ferguson, a Union soldier, pleaded with his wife not
to abandon him: "Martin has not seen you for a long time. He cannot
think of you as I do. O Jane! do not go to Charleston. Come to Jacksonville.
I will get a house and we will live here. Never mind what the people say.
Come to me, Jane.” But Jane dictated a response that terminated both the
correspondence and their marriage: "Tell him, I say I’m sorry he finds it
so hard to do his duty. But as he does, I shall do mine, an’ I shall always

pray de Lord to bless him-I shall never write to him no more. But tell

him I wish him well .” 43

Emancipation functioned in some cases as an instant and convenient
divorce, enabling a couple to dissolve their marriage by mutually agreeing
not to formalize it. Some freedmen and freedwomen seized the chance to
annul an incompatible and loveless marriage, which in several instances
had been forced upon them by their owner. In a "divorce” case argued
before a Union officer in Louisiana, the husband claimed he had done
everything in his power for the comfort ofhis wife and wished to retain her,
but the woman declared she could now take care of herself and refused to
stay with a man whom she did not love . 44 Among families that had survived
bondage intact, the difficult post-emancipation decision about whether to
stay with their last master also produced conflicts which were sometimes

How Free Is Free?

243

resolved by divorce. More often than not, however, those who lived together
at the end of the war did not avail themselves of the opportunity to dissolve
those ties, suggesting the extent to which their marriages had been based
on considerations other than the convenience of the master.

During slavery, interracial sexual liaisons—usually between slave
women and white men, sometimes between slave men and white women
—had occasionally developed into affectionate and lasting relationships.
Obviously, such ties could neither be solemnized nor legalized, and few
even cared to admit that they were based on genuine feelings of love,
particularly those involving white women. Emancipation permitted inter¬
racial couples to formalize those relationships, at least to the extent state
laws and public opinion would tolerate them. When the daughter of a
former slave owner in Mississippi announced her intention to marry one
of their former slaves, with whom she had already established a relation¬
ship, a local judge refused to believe her avowal of love for the man and
ordered the arraignment and trial of the couple. With different results, a
quadroon mistress of a planter in Mississippi refused to continue a relation¬
ship with her master after the war unless he agreed to marriage; they
finally prevailed upon a reluctant army chaplain to perform the necessary
rites after the master claimed he had "married her in the sight of God five
years ago.” The difficulties that confronted a white woman and a black man
made any permanent relationship almost impossible in the postwar South.
Although the courts always dealt harshly with attacks on whites, whatever
the evidence, a court in Fredericksburg, Virginia, acquitted a black woman
accused of assaulting a white woman who had "stolen the affections” ofher
black husband, prompting him to leave her for the white woman. That
came about as close to justifiable assault in the eyes of the white commu¬
nity as any black person could commit . 45

Neither the legalization nor the sanctification of black marriages nec¬
essarily moved the ex-slaves to adopt in full the sexual code of upper-class
whites. "The negroes had their own ideas of morality, and held to them
very strictly,” the proprietress of a Georgia plantation observed; "they did
not consider it wrong for a girl to have a child before she married, but
afterwards were extremely severe upon anything like infidelity on her
part. Indeed, the good old law of female submission to the husband’s will
on all points held good.” While both races frowned upon certain sexual
practices (such as adultery), the differences which persisted in defining
moral behavior (such as the condoning of prenuptial sex among blacks) and
the post-emancipation complications surrounding polygamy help to ex¬
plain the intensity with which white missionaries and black preachers
dwelled on black "moral vices” and admonished the ex-slaves to conform
in every respect to the Victorian moral code. When Clinton B. Fisk, a
sympathetic Freedmen’s Bureau officer, counseled freedmen and freed-
women that God would no longer close his eyes to "adultery and fornica¬
tion” among them, he was saying little that black preachers had not
already said on numerous occasions. "Look at de white folks,” one such

244

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

preacher told his congregation. "D’ye eber see a white man want to marry
a woman when he had a lawful wife a libing? Neber! I neber heared ob sech
a thing in all my life. A white man is ’structed; he knows dat’s agin de law
and de gospil .” 48

Although reports of rampant "polygamy, adultery, and indiscriminate
sexual intercourse” among the ex-slaves would reinforce white notions of
black moral laxity, some Freedmen’s Bureau officers readily conceded that
a disproportionate number of such cases came to their attention. "If I
exaggerate in this matter,” a Bureau officer in South Carolina wrote, "it
is because, like most officers of justice, I saw chiefly the evil side of my
public—all the deserted ones co min g to me for the redress of their griev¬
ances or for help in their poverty.” Actually, the seriousness with which
most blacks assumed and sustained their marital vows, like the intense
interest they had shown in locating family members, surprised and elated
many Bureau officers and northern missionaries, who had come to the
South prepared for the worst. If Horace Greeley, the New York editor,
thought "enslaved, degraded, hopeless races or classes are always lewd,”
that was far from the conclusion reached by a white teacher in postwar
Virginia. "The colored people easily assume the responsibilities, proprie¬
ties, and graces of civilized life. As a class, their tastes are comely, though
they are acquainted with filth. I fancy they see the moral significance of
things quite as readily as white people.” And if white masters and mis¬
tresses claimed credit for the "civilizing influences” they had exerted on
their slaves, the freedmen and freedwomen took some pride in the moral
values they had managed to sustain in the quarters, often in the face of the
grossest forms of white savagery . 47

The eagerness of blacks to assume the "graces of civilized life” mani¬
fested itself in ways that native whites found most disturbing. "The black
women do not like to work,” an Alabama planter reported, "it is not lady¬
like.” The phenomenon he described was real enough, though whites
tended to exaggerate its prevalence. With the acknowledgment of emanci¬
pation, many black women did withdraw their labor from the fields and the
white man’s kitchen in order to spend more time tending to their own
husbands and children. If the women themselves did not initiate such
moves, the men often insisted upon it, and husbands and wives together
effected arrangements that would be more compatible with freedom. Mary
Jones, the Georgia proprietress, tersely summed up the changes affecting
her own household: "Gilbert will stay on his old terms, but withdraws
Fanny and puts Harry and Little Abram in her place and puts his son
Gilbert out to a trade. Cook Kate wants to be relieved of the heavy burden
of cooking for two and wait on her husband.” No less distraught, an Ala¬
bama planter claimed he had lost one fourth of his labor because the men
regarded it as "a matter of pride” to exact from their employers a new
division of labor that would exempt their women from field work. Where
women continued to work, the men often insisted during contract negotia-
tions that wives and mothers be given time off during the regular work¬
week to tend to their housekeeping chores . 48

How Free Is Free?

245

That the withdrawal of women from the labor force was frequent¬
ly made at the insistence of the men reflected a determination by many
husbands and fathers to reinforce their position as the head of the family
in accordance with the accepted norms of the dominant society. The place
for the woman was in the home, attending to the business of the home.
"When I married my wife,” a Tennessee freedman told his employer, in
rejecting his request for her services, "I married her to wait on me and she
has got all she can do right here for me and the children.” Like many
outside observers, Laura Towne, a northern white teacher in the Sea Is¬
lands, explained such developments as a natural reaction to the dominant
place she had assumed black women had occupied in the slave household.
In wishing to "rule their wives,” the men could thus hardly be blamed for
exercising "an inestimable privilege” of freedom. "In slavery the woman
was far more important, and was in every way held higher than the man.
It was the woman’s house, the children were entirely hers, etc., etc.” Since
emancipation, however, Laura Towne had observed the frequency with
which black leaders urged black men "to get the women into their proper
place—never to tell them anything of their concerns, etc., etc.; and the
notion of being bigger than women generally, is just now inflating the
conceit of the males to an amazing degree .” 49

If the spectacle of black marriages amused former masters and mis¬
tresses, the inclination of black women "to play the lady” did not, particu¬
larly when it made it more difficult for white women to do so. On a
Mississippi plantation, where the black women suddenly refused to work,
the employer (who had been their former master) ordered them to resume
their positions in the field or leave the premises. They left. What whites
contemptuously called "playing the lady” occasionally took the form of
black women cavorting about town in the cast-off finery of their last mis¬
tress. Despite these much-publicized examples, however, most black
women charged with "playing the lady” had simply opted to spend more
time in their own households and made labor arrangements that would
permit them to do so. A Georgia planter, for example, managed to hire four
"good hands,” only to discover that their wives had no intention of cooking
for him, at least not until they had discussed the matter with him. Aware
of his inability to hire a cook, the women took advantage of their bargain¬
ing position and exacted promises to pay them "their own price” and,
equally important, to permit them to divide the housework and cooking
among themselves. Presumably, this arrangement would have given each
of them ample time to meet her own domestic responsibilities. Such experi¬
ences, not at all uncommon, revealed that many black women, rather than
withdraw from work altogether, used the threat quite successfully to ob¬
tain better terms from an employer . 50

Few black leaders, clergymen, or editors would have disputed the
"plain counsels” offered by a Freedmen’s Bureau officer to the emancipated
black woman about her proper role in the home. Before marriage, she
should learn to knit, sew, mend clothes, bake bread, keep a clean house,
cultivate a garden, and read and write, while at the same time remaining

246

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

"a true woman”—that is, protecting her chastity. After marriage, she
would be expected to take proper care of her person, to appear always
clean, neat, and tidy, and to look "as pretty as possible.” That was simply
another way of saying that black women should aspire to be like their white
counterparts and abide by the conventional wisdom and experience of
mid-nineteenth-century American society. Not all black women, however,
willingly assented to such a narrow definition of their roles, few of them
had the means to become "ladies” of leisure, and some did not look upon
white women as the most desirable models to imitate; indeed, their previ¬
ous experiences with white "ladies” had not necessarily filled them with
awe, admiration, or even respect. Whatever black men might have pre¬
ferred, most black women could not afford to withdraw from outside labor
after emancipation; many continued to work in the fields alongside their
men, while others moved into the towns in the hope of obtaining more
remunerative employment. 51

Out of economic necessity and the experience of slavery, black women
fashioned a place for themselves in the post-emancipation family and com¬
munity. Invariably, it would be a more important position than that occu¬
pied by their white counterparts. If fewer black women labored in the
fields, they often cared for the family garden plot, worked as washerwomen
or wet nurses, and performed other jobs that were necessary to supplement
the family income. If they deferred to the men and absented themselves
from the political discussions, they might still guard the rifles stacked
outside the meeting places. And in the waning years of Reconstruction,
when whites threatened to regain power, black women in Charleston were
sighted "carrying axes or hatchets in their hands hanging down at their
sides, their aprons or dresses half-concealing the weapons.” Exhorting a
large audience to defend the work of Reconstruction, a black clergyman
would warn of "80,000 black men in the State who can use Winchesters and
200,000 black women who can light a torch and use a knife.” 52

No matter how they manifested their freedom, black men and women
found themselves in a better position to defend their marital fidelity, to
maintain their family ties, and to control their own children. That in itself
ensured an enhanced dignity and pride as a family that slavery had so often
compromised. But nothing could erase the still vivid memories of the fear
and experience of forced separation from loved ones and the innumerable
tragedies and complications which such separations, as well as the day-to-
day indignities of slave life, had inflicted upon their f amili es. More than
the memories of those years remained to haunt them. Near Norfolk, Vir¬
ginia, a long-separated couple found each other near the end of the war.
"Twas like a stroke of death to me,” the woman said afterwards. "We threw
ourselves into each others arms and cried. His wife looked on and was
jealous, but she needn’t have been. My husband is so kind, I shouldn’t leave
him if he hadn’t had another wife, and of course I shouldn’t now. Yes, my
husband’s very kind, but I ain’t happy.” The momentary reunion bad been
painful for both of them. Reflecting back upon her first marriage, the days

How Free Is Free?

247

they had spent together, and the forced separation, she could only say,
"White folk's got a heap to answer for the way they've done to colored folks!
So much they wont never pray it away!'' 53

Compared to the many acute problems facing the freedman, the question
of his name might have seemed the least consequential. But the newly
freed slaves thought otherwise, sharing a concern with names and naming
voiced nearly a century later by Ralph Ellison.

For it is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world. Our
names, being the gift of others, must be made our own.... They must
become our masks and our shields and the containers of all those values
and traditions which we learn and/or imagine as being the meaning of
our familial past.

And when we are reminded so constantly that we bear, as Negroes,
names originally possessed by those who owned our enslaved grandpar¬
ents, we are apt... to be more than ordinarily concerned with the veiled
and mysterious events, the fusions of blood, the furtive couplings, the
business transactions, the violations of faith and loyalty, the assaults;
yes, and the unrecognized and unrecognizable loves through which our
names were handed down unto us . 54

Rather than reveal a sordid past, the names assumed or revealed after
emancipation reflected a new beginning—an essential step toward achiev¬
ing the self-respect, the personal dignity, and the independence which
slavery had compromised. "We hardly knowed our names," recalled Sallie
Crane, a former Arkansas slave. "We was cussed for so many bitches and
sons ofbitches and bloody bitches, and blood of bitches. We never heard our
names scarcely at all.” Describing "the most cruel acts" inflicted upon him
as a slave, William Wells Brown singled out the order that he drop the
name his mother had given him. (The master had wished to placate his
nephew, also named William, who had recently taken up residence on the
plantation.) "I received several very severe whippings for telling people
that my name was William, after orders were given to change it. Though
young, I was old enough to place a high appreciation upon my name." Until
his escape, he went by the name of Sandford, but the moment he reached
a safe haven he adopted his old name "and let Sandford go by the board,
for I always hated it. Not because there was anything peculiar in the name;
but because it had been forced upon me." 55

During slavery, many blacks only had a given name. Although most
slaves appear to have named their own children, the master might arbi¬
trarily assign a name, borrowing heavily from classical, biblical, and sim-

248

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

plified Anglo-Saxon appellations; the naming process also afforded him a
chance to indulge in some humorous whims, and some did so at the expense
of the slave’s dignity. Masters might permit certain favorites and slaves
who exercised authority over other slaves to adopt their own surnames; the
less privileged were apt to have the same surname as the master—a con¬
venient way to identify the plantation to which they belonged. To allow the
slave to use his own surname, Jacob Stroyer recalled, "would be shar in g
an honor which was due only to his master, and that would be too much
for a negro, said they, who was nothing more than a servant. So it was held
as a crime for a slave to be caught using his own name, a crime which would
expose him to severe punishment.” Numerous ex-slaves, then, like Wash
Ingram of Texas, recalled only that "we always went by the name of
whoever we belonged to.” In South Carolina, a teacher in a freedmen’s
school tried without success to induce one of the pupils to state her sur¬
name. "Only Phyllis, ma’am,” she would reply. Finally, an older student
interceded, exclaiming, "Pshaw, gal! What’s you’m title?” The pupil then
understood what was demanded, and she gave the name of her former
master. 56

More often than many masters realized, slaves adopted their own
surnames. "When the white folks speak of them they say 'John, that be¬
longs to Mr. So and So,’ ” Robert Smalls testified during the war. "But
among themselves they use their titles.... Before their masters they do not
speak of their titles at all.” Plantation records rarely listed slaves by sur¬
names, and the vast rice plantations owned by the Heyward family in
South Carolina were no exception. Some of the more prominent blacks,
however, like "old blacksmith Caesar,” were known by both their given
names and their surnames. And "among themselves,” Duncan Clinch Hey¬
ward conceded, "the slaves all had surnames, and immediately after they
were freed these names came to light. The surnames were selected by the
Negroes themselves. Scarcely ever did a Negro choose the name of his or
her owner, but often took that of some other slaveholding family, of which
he knew.” Occasionally, surnames other than that of the master would
surface beyond the confines of the slave quarters, much to the surprise of
the white family. "Mammy, what makes you call Henry Mr. Ferguson,”
Susan Dabney Smedes remembered askin g her "usually indulgent”
mammy, who had taken her to a slave wedding. "Do you think ’cause
we are black that we cyam’t have no names?” she replied indignantly.
Usually, however, such names were not publicly revealed until after
emancipation. 5 7

Although family pride was reason enough, certain practical consider¬
ations also encouraged the selection of names after emancipation. Whether
to enlist in the Union Army, live in the contraband camps, apply for relief
at the Freedmen’s Bureau office, or, some years later, vote in an election,
blacks needed to register both a given name and a surname with Federal
authorities. Henry Banner took his surname under the erroneous impres¬
sion that it would qualify him for a government bounty of forty acres arirl

How Free Is Free?

249

a mule. '"He told me never to go by any name except Banner. That was all
the mule they ever give me.” Midway through the war, Federal officials
expressed some consternation over the number of contrabands who gave
them false names. "Perhaps, after all, no false motive influences them,” a
white missionary teacher tried to explain, "as they may bear many names
in a lifetime.” Still, she found herself repeatedly frustrated in trying to
ascertain the full names of the freedmen and freedwomen she encountered.
"They are Judith or John, and nothing more.” Not at all hesitant about
adopting or revealing surnames were scores of ex-slaves who considered
this step necessary to demonstrate and ensure their newly won freedom.
"No man thought he was perfectly free,” the overseer on a Louisiana
plantation observed, "unless he had changed his name and taken a family
name. Precious few of’em ever took that of their old masters.” If any doubts
remained about the validity of emancipation, some freed slaves came up
with the ingenious idea that a new name might be a useful device to retain
their freedom and avoid re-enslavement. "When us black folks got set
free,” Alice Wilkins recalled, "us’n change our names, so effen the white
folks get together and change their minds and don’t let us be free any more,
then they have a hard time finding us.” 58

The notion that blacks marked their emancipation by repudiating
their slave names distorts the significance those names had assumed for
large numbers of slaves, particularly the ways in which they often reflected
a deeply felt familial consciousness. Although some freedmen quickly
dropped the whimsical names their masters had bestowed on them, nearly
everyone else retained his or her previous given name. This had been their
sole identity during bondage, often the only remaining link to parents from
whom they had been separated and who had initially named them. No
matter how harsh a bondage they had endured, few freed slaves revealed
any desire to obliterate their entire past or family heritage, and those
whose given names or surnames reflected kinship ties tended to guard
them zealously. Many freedmen, on the other hand, adopted surnames for
the first time, often choosing a name that would set them off as a discrete
family, some began to use openly the surnames they had assumed as slaves,
and still others slightly altered their names to symbolize their right to do
so. Once they knew of their freedom, Lee Guidon recollected, "a heap of
people say they was going to name their selves over. They named their
selves big names.... Some of the names was Abraham an’ some called their
selves Lincum. Any big name ’ceptin’ their master’s name. It was the
fashion.” If that was "the fashion,” Lee Guidon’s father decided to be the
exception—he kept the name of his master, because "fine folks raise us an’
we goiner hold to our own names.” 59

If freedmen retained or adopted their master’s surname, this did not
necessarily reflect any deep affection for him or the conditions of bondage
on that plantation. In many instances, the name of the ex-slave’s parents
or grandparents was the same as that of the master, and that alone was
sufficient reason to hold on to it. Martin Jackson, who had been a slave on

250

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the Fitzpatrick plantation in Texas, thought many years later that taking
the master’s name after emancipation had reflected expediency more than
anything else. "This was done more because it was the logical thing to do
and the easiest way to be identified than it was through affection for the
master. Also, the government seemed to be in a almighty hurry to have us
get names. We had to register as someone, so we could be citizens.” When
forced to choose his own surname, however, Jackson thought about all the
slaves who would assume the name Fitzpatrick. "I made up my mind Fd
find me a different one. One of my grandfathers in Africa was called Jeaceo,
and so I decided to be Jackson.” 60

The freedman who took the name of an earlier owner, perhaps the first
owner he could recall, often made that choice out of a sense of historical
identity, continuity, and family pride—the reputation of the particular
master notwithstanding. The idea was not to honor a previous master but
to sustain some identification with the freedman’s family of origin.

I don’t know whether my father used his master’s name or his father’s

name. His father’s name was Jerry Greene, and his master’s name was

Henry Bibb. 1 don’t know which name he went by, but I call myself

Greene because his father’s name was Jerry Greene.

After emancipation, Aleck Gillison adopted the surname of a previous
master who had sold him; so did Jim Henry’s father, who had once belonged
to the Patrick Henry family of Virginia; Isaac Thomas, the slave of I. D.
Thomas, a Texas planter, returned to his old home in Florida, where he
"find out he people and git he real name, and dat am Beckett.” Similarly,
Anson Harp had belonged to Tom Harp, a Mississippi planter, before being
separated from his parents and sold to James Henry Hammond, a promi¬
nent South Carolina planter. After the war, he refused to take the name
of Hammond, " ’cause too many of his slaves do,” and decided to keep the
name of his old master. That was "the one my daddy and mammy had,”
he explained, though he never saw them again after their forced separa¬
tion. 61

In adopting surnames, as in other manifestations of their new freedom,
the ex-slaves defied any easy categorization. If, for a variety of reasons,
some took the names of old or recent masters, many openly repudiated such
names. "That’s my ole rebel master’s title,” a young South Carolina black
protested after he used the name of Middleton in a freedmen’s school.
"Him’s nothing to me now. I don’t belong to he no longer, an’ I don’t see
no use in being called for him.” While enrolling a freedman in the Union
Army, a recruiting officer in Tennessee demanded that he take a surname
and suggested that of his previous master. The proposal struck the young
black man with obvious dismay. "No, suh,” he replied emphatically. "Fse
had nuff o’ ole massa .” In some instances, Federal officials expedited the
na ming process by fiirnishing the names themselves, and invariably the
name would be the same as that of the freedman’s most recent master. But

How Free Is Free?

251

these appear to have been exceptional cases; the ex-slaves themselves usu¬
ally took the initiative—like the Virginia mother who changed the name
of her son from Jeff Davis, which was how the masted had known him, to
Thomas Grant, which seemed to suggest the freedom she was now exercis¬
ing. Whatever names the freed slaves adopted, whether that of a previous
master, a national leader, an occupational skill, a place of residence, or a
color, they were most often making that decision themselves. That was
what mattered. 62

That freedmen should have assumed the surnames of prominent white
families might have flattered the patriarchal ego and self-image of the
planter class, but it also left some whites in utter dismay and few of
them had any notion of the considerations that entered into such deci¬
sions. "I used to be proud of my name,” Caroline Ravenel wrote a close
friend. "I have ceased to be so. I fear it will no longer [be] spotless, as the
two meanest negroes on the place have appropriated it.” Eliza Frances
Andrews, the daughter of a prominent Georgian, expressed some amuse¬
ment over the names taken by the family’s former slaves but she also
proved to be far more perceptive than most whites. In the Andrews
household, the family servant, Charity, announced on her wedding day
that she had two names, like her "white folks”; she would henceforth be
addressed as Mrs. Tatom, while her husband, Hamp, a field hand, would
now be known as Mr. Sam Ampey Tatom. Trying to keep a straight face,
Eliza Andrews asked her how they had come by the name of Tatom. "His
grandfather used to belong to a Mr. Tatom,” she replied, "so he took his
name for his entitles. 99 The blacks "seldom or never” adopted the names
of their most recent owners, Miss Andrews observed; almost always, they
would take the name of some former master, "and they go as far back as
possible.” After all, she surmised, "it was the name of the actual owner that
distinguished them in slavery, and I suppose they wish to throw off that
badge of servitude. Then, too, they have their notions of family pride.” But
even as these changes both amused and impressed her, Eliza Andrews had
to confess to herself that they were not altogether pleasing.

All these changes are very sad to me, in spite of their comic side. There
will soon be no more old mammies and daddies, no more old uncles and
aunties. Instead of "maum Judy” and "uncle Jacob,” we shall have our
"Mrs. Ampey Tatoms,” and our "Mr. Lewis Williamses.” The sweet ties
that bound our old family servants to us will be broken and replaced with
envy and ill-will. 63

Being free was often a day-to-day struggle, if only to understand the new
possibilities and dangers. The achievement of an individual dignity and
self-respect commensurate with their legal status demanded of black peo-

252

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

pie much more than the adoption or revelation of family names. Now that
they were free, some thought the old pretenses and demeanor could be
dropped. The need to cringe in the presence of whites or to respond obsequi¬
ously to their whims and petty humiliations seemed i<*ss compelling. Free¬
dom, as a former Georgia slave defined it, meant taking "no more
foolishment off of white folks.” Early in 1865, two white men were walking
along a street in Helena, Arkansas, when they encountered a freedman.
"How do ye do, Mr. Powell,” the black man greeted one of them. "Howdy,
uncle,” Powell replied. Several months earlier, that familiar exchange of
greetings would have terminated the conversation, but not in this first year
of emancipation. Much to Powell’s astonishment, the black man cursed
him, denied that he was his uncle, and made it clear that he did not permit
such people to claim kinship with him. When Powell protested that, he was
only trying to be "civil,” the freedman angrily retorted, "Call me Mister.”
And with that parting salvo, the men went their respective ways. The
much-perturbed Powell turned to his companion and exclaimed, "Oh my
God; how long before my ass will be kicked by every negro that meets
me?” 64

Comparable incidents and confrontations were bound to arise while
former slaves explored the content of their freedom. This was the appropri¬
ate time, some of them thought, to give substance to their new status, even
to challenge and revamp the traditional and seemingly inviolate code of
racial etiquette. Of what use was a family name if white people seldom used
it in addressing blacks, if they persisted in referring to adult black men and
women as "boy,” "girl,” or "nigger,” while reserving the honorific titles of
"auntie” and "uncle” for the venerable few. After emancipation, F.mmg
Watson recalled, she perceived few changes in her status, except that the
mistress both acknowledged and demeaned her freedom at the samo tinw
as in the command: "Come here, you li’l old free nigger.” Even without the
benefit of organized or coordinated action, freedmen and freedwomen maH»
known their objections to these linguistic relics of bondage, some of them
insisting that they be addressed by their surnames (preceded by the appro¬
priate mister, missus, or miss), that they no longer be identified by the
plantation or the master for whom they worked (as in Colonel Pinckney’s
Ned), that they be treated, in other words, as mature men and women
rather than as children or pets. For whites to address adult black men as
"boys,” a black clergyman declared, was to evince a "spirit of malice” he
deemed incompatible with the rights of free "colored men.” The use of such
terms, he charged, assumed that a black man was little more than "a
six-year-old stripling or a two-year colt,” and it reminded him of the Irish¬
man who testified that "in the 'ould counthry,’ when they whistled for him
to come to dinner, he never knew whether it was himself or the hogs they
wanted.” With unjustified optimism, the clergyman warned that "white or
colored Christians” would no longer tolerate such terms of address. 85

The problem defied any early resolution. Not only did whites persist
in using the familiar terms of address but the blacks themselves found it

How Free Is Free?

253

difficult to discard the titles by which they had customarily known their
former owners. As slaves, they had addressed them as "master” and
"mistress,” or even more familiarly as "marster” or "mars” and as
"mistis,” "miss,” or "missy,” usually followed only by the Christian
name, as in "Miss Ann” or "Mars Bill.” Customarily, they had used titles
like "boss,” "cap’n,” "major,” and "colonel” in addressing white men of
high rank with whom they were less acquainted. (The term "boss” might
be reserved for whites who were neither slaveholders nor "poor buckra.”)
After learning of his freedom, a Georgia black wanted to know, "You got
to say master?” to which a fellow freedman responded in the negative. "But
they said it all the same,” Sarah Jane Paterson recalled. "They said it for
a long time.” In Virginia, a Union officer in charge of freedmen affairs
reproached some ex-slaves for referring to him as "massa,” explaining that
they were no longer slaves. "No, massa,” one of them replied, "but I’m so
used to it.” Searching for alternatives to the traditional "marsa” and "mis¬
sus,” but not wishing to incur the charge of insolence, some freedmen,
especially the younger ones, resolved the dilemma by addressing their
former masters as "boss” or "cap’n” and their former mistresses as
"ma’am.” Since those titles had often been used in the past when speaking
with strangers, they suggested less intimacy and seemed more appropriate
to the new relationships. 66

With some exceptions, the men and women who had once owned slaves
evinced no urgent desire to alter the traditional forms of deference and
recognition. If nothing else, whites clung to social usages which reminded
them of happier and more orderly times. The language and demeanor of
the blacks had always defined their place in society and their relationship
with whites, and in the chaotic postwar years, many whites preferred to
think that a semblance of sanity and good manners might have survived
emancipation. Louis Manigault, the Georgia planter, thus confessed his
pleasure at being called "Maussa” and at seeing his former slaves "still
showing respect by taking off their caps.” Some planters even went so far
as to stipulate in the labor contracts they drew up with the freedmen that
they be addressed as "master.” Seeking to accommodate himself to emanci¬
pation, Thomas Dabney, the prosperous Mississippi planter, advised his
ex-slaves they no longer had to call him "master,” but he seemed reassured
by the chorus of "Yes, marster” that greeted his admonition. "They seem
to bring in 'master’ and say it oftener than they ever did,” he observed, and
Dabney preferred to accept it in good faith as a sign of affection; indeed,
as his daughter noted, the term "seemed to grow into a term of endear¬
ment,” and former slaves Dabney had never known became tenants on the
plantation and also called him "master.” With equal pride, a Mississippi
white woman displayed her "little Confederate nigger,” as she called her,
to a northern visitor. "She is the only one I have been able to keep, and I
only have her because her parents haven’t yet been able to coax her away.”
The young black girl still called her "Missey,” and the mistress proclaimed
this fact with unconcealed delight, as if it were a singular achievement in

254

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the post-emancipation South. Perhaps it was. "All the niggers have been
trying to break her of that, but they can’t. They tell her to call me Miss
Lizzie, but she says 'she may be your Miss Lizzie, but she’s my Missey.’ ”
One day in church, her servant left the other blacks, declaring loudly for
everyone to hear that she preferred to sit with her "Missey.” That created
quite a stir, the mistress conceded. "You should have seen everybody’s head
turning to see who it was, in these sorrowful times, that was still fortunate
enough to be called Missey!” 87

Dismayed by the post-emancipation behavior of her fellow servants,
particularly their truckling manner and continued use of terms like "mas¬
ter” and "mistress,” a Mississippi black woman admonished them in the
very presence of the white family to change their ways. They had "no
master or mistress on earth,” she informed them, and "they were fools” to
act as though they did. But the old habits proved difficult to break, even
as the old fears of the power wielded by their former masters proved
difficult to surmount. "My master would kill any-body who called any-body
but a white person Missis,” a Virginia freedwoman declared. How blacks
addressed each other often prompted equal dismay among black clergymen
and northern white emissaries. Seeking to check the frequent use of the
term "nigger,” Colonel Higginson, the well-intentioned commander of a
black regiment, instructed his white officers to address the black soldiers
by their full names. But he found that the blacks themselves used deroga¬
tory terms like "nigger” with little hesitation, and he was at a loss to know
how to combat such behavior. "They have meekly accepted it,” he sighed.
To a postwar English visitor, the derogatory terms used by blacks reflected
the value they placed on color. "White was the tint of nobility; black the
symbol of degradation. If one coloured man wanted to insult another, he
called him a nigger. To call him 'a charcoal nigger’ was the blackest insult
of all, ma k i n g him the furthest remove from the nobility of whiteness.”
Based upon his experiences in postwar South Carolina, Sidney Andrews,
a northern correspondent, offered a more positive view of black terminol¬
ogy- He discovered that the terms "cousin” and "brother” were commonly
used and "seem to be expressive of equality.” Although "the older and more
trusted blacks” on the plantation seldom referred to a field band as
"cousin,” the field hands themselves frequently addressed each other as
"Bro’ Bob, Bro’ John, Co’n Sally, Co’ Pete, &c.” What Andrews described,
however, was less a phenomenon of emancipation than the continuation of
traditional practices. 88

The term "nigger,” as used by blacks, had varying inflections, implica¬
tions, and definitions, ranging from a description of slavish personalities to
an expression of endearment. To a South Carolina freedman, the term had
class connotations and suggested dependency on the white man. "Dey be
niggers still, and dey will be for great many year, and dey no lib togeder
widout de white man to look arter ’em. You take ten colored folks an tree
of ’em may stop being nigger, but de rest allers be nigger and dere chil’n
be nigger.” Whatever blacks meant by the term, they almost all detested

How Free Is Free?

255

its use by whites, but the very fact of emancipation appears to have in¬
creased its popularity in white circles. Early in 1866, Mary Chesnut
claimed to have heard the word used for the first time "by people comme
il faut. Now it is in everybody’s mouth, but I have never become accus¬
tomed to it.” No doubt the term became more popular as whites searched
for ways to address those who had been slaves. Ethelred Philips, a Florida
physician and farmer, stubbornly refused to call them "freedmen” or even
"colored people,” a term which they preferred to "negroes.” "I never
will call them 'colored people,’ ” Philips vowed. "It sounds too much
liWp a Yankee, besides, they are but negroes and never can be anything
else.” 69

Responding to a sympathetic Quaker missionary from Massachusetts
who had rebuked her for referring to the freedmen as "niggers,” an elderly
black woman in Savannah defended her use of the term as appropriate to
the condition of her people. No matter what they might be called, she
suggested, and regardless of what emancipation might bring, deeply en¬
trenched views would not be easily given up. "We are niggers,” she in¬
sisted. "We always was niggers, and we always shall be; nigger here, and
nigger there, nigger do this, and nigger do that. We’ve got no souls, we are
animals We are black and so is the evil one.” The missionary interrupted
her at this point to explain that nothing in the Bible indicated that the
devil might be black. "Well, white folks say so,” the freedwoman replied,
"and we’se bound to believe ’em, cause we’se nothing but animals and
niggers. Yes, we’se niggers! niggers! niggers!” Whether this Quaker mis¬
sionary understood what the black woman was trying to tell her is not
clear. Fortunately for the well-meaning emissary from New England, she
could turn to some of the more attractive features of Savannah, like the
"excellent music in a fine colored church,” to take her mind off this un¬
pleasant encounter with "an old cotton-picking 'auntie.’ ” 70

While probing the limits of their freedom, black people quickly discov¬
ered that the line between impudence and the traditional subservience
expected of them was perilously narrow, that matters of racial etiquette
could seldom be compromised, and that whites were more sensitive than
usual to any behavior which suggested social equality or manifested an
unbecoming assertiveness, familiarity, or lack of respect. To have lost the
war and suffered the humiliation of Yankee occupation had been penance
enough. "It is hard to have to lay our loved ones in the grave, to have them
fall by thousands on the battle-field, to be stripped of everything,” a Savan¬
nah white woman declared, "but the hardest of all is nigger equality, and
I won’t submit to it.” 71

That did not mean, as a farmer in North Carolina assured two north-

256

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

em visitors, whites in the South wished to return the blacks to slavery, only
that they had no desire to mix with them socially. He expected any white
man in the country could readily appreciate that principle without ascrib¬
ing evil intent or inhumanity to those who merely wished to implement it
in day-to-day life.

I haven’t any prejudices against ’em because they’re free, but you see I
can’t consider that they’re on an equality with a white man. I may like
him, but I can’t let h i m come to my table and sit down like either of you
gentlemen. I feel better than he is. The niggers has a kind of a scent about
him that’s enough for me. You Northern men needn’t think that we hate
’em; I rather like ’em myself, and I believe we treat ’em better than you
would.

As if to underscore his decent instincts, the farmer reminded his guests
that during slavery blacks had usually been tried by a jury of slaveholders.
"That don’t look much as if we were inclined to be too hard on ’em, does
it?” If blacks or Yankees tried to force equal rights upon the South, the
Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates warned, they would only poison
the good feelings that now prevailed between the races. "There is no un¬
kind feeling towards the negro in a position where he is not asserting an
equality; but the best friend a negro ever had in the world, the kindest
friend he ever had, a young boy or girl raised by a negro mammy, anH
devotedly attached to her, would become ferociously indi gnan t if the old
mammy were to claim equality for a moment.” 72

To free the slaves did not make them equal. That was a mavim to
which all classes of whites could subscribe, and any actions by freed blacks
to the contrary broke the limits of toleration and invited not only con¬
demnation but vigilant action. Recognizing the universality of that senti¬
ment, many freedmen who were eager to test their freedom hesitated to
provoke post-emancipation white sensitivities. Since the slightest devia¬
tion from "normal” behavior might be deemed impudent or presumptuous,
they often found themselves forced to act with even greater caution than
usual. But black tolerance, too, had its limits. Without necessarily flaunt¬
ing their freedom, blacks demanded, at the very least, a respect that would
be commensurate with their new status. In a hotel dining room in Knox¬
ville, Tennessee, for example, a white guest requested service by calling out
to the black waiter (who was about thirty years old), "Here, boy!” That
familiar greeting had no doubt been uttered thousands of times in this
setting, but the "boy's” response had few if any precedents. "My name is
Dick,” he announced. Whether irritated at being corrected or at the tone
of the black man’s voice, the hotel guest quickly turned into an irate
defender of his race. "You’ll answer to the name I call you,” he roared, "or
I’ll blow a hole through you!” When the waiter ignored him and went about
his business, the much-disgusted white man addressed the other dining-
room patrons on the proper treatment of impudent freedmen:

How Free Is Free?

257

"Last week, in Chattanooga, I said to a nigger I found at the railroad,

'Here, Buck! show me the baggage-room.’ He said, 'My name a’n’t Buck.’

I just put my six-shooter to his head, and by-! he didn’t stop to think

what his name was, but showed me what I wanted.”

Upon hearing his story, the other hotel guests "warmly applauded” his
sentiments, except for one unenlightened white man who failed to perceive
the impudence in the freedman’s response. 73

Even if the ex-slave made no overt move to exercise his freedom, even
if his demeanor remained virtually unchanged, that in itself might be
greeted with suspicion, as though he were masking his real feelings behind
the old "darky” facade. All too often, in fact, the freedman did not have to
say anything in order to displease or raise suspicions in the whites; he only
had to look a certain way or fail to exhibit the expected lowered head and
shuffling feet. "They perceive insolence in a tone, a glance, a gesture, or
failure to yield enough by two or three inches in meeting on the sidewalk,”
a visitor to Wilmington, North Carolina, observed. Some of his fellow
whites, a Virginian remarked, "can’t see a nigger go along the street nowa¬
days that they don’t damn him for putting on airs.” To defy the expecta¬
tions of whites had always been a highly dangerous undertaking, even
when no "offense” had been intended, but to do so in the wake of the recent
military disaster and emancipation was to invite an even more volatile
response. 74

The behavior of white men and women underscored the tacit assump¬
tion most of them embraced with a kind of religious zeal—that neither
the Civil War nor emancipation had in any way altered the time-
honored etiquette of racial relations. "With us, the death of slavery is
recognized,” affirmed a South Carolina Unionist and former slaveholder,
"but we don’t believe that because the nigger is free he ought to be saucy;
and we don’t mean to have any such nonsense as letting him vote. He’s
helpless and ignorant, and dependent, and the old masters will still control
him.” If anything, in fact—and innumerable whites testified to this effect
—the need to maintain the traditional code regulating the relations be¬
tween the races was now more urgent than ever before, perhaps even a
matter of self-preservation. After all, a North Carolina farmer warned,
seemingly unaware of the implications of what he was saying, "If we let
a nigger git equal with us, the next thing we know he’ll be ahead of us. He’s
so impudent and presumin’.” 75

During slavery, custom and habit had largely defined the behavior
expected of blacks, and the rules had been sufficiently understood to make
special laws unnecessary. The slave addressed his owners in respectful
terms; he never sat down or kept his hat on in the presence of whites; he
never initiated a conversation with them unless first addressed; if he ac¬
companied his master or mistress to town or to church, he walked several
steps behind them; if he encountered any whites on the sidewalk, he made
ample room for them to pass, stepping down into the street if necessary;

258

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

and he never suggested by any words, looks, or mannerisms anything less
than the respect, humility, and cheerful obedience expected of him at all
times. From his own experience, Frederick Douglass had described the
circumscribed world of the slave:

A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—
are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a
slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has the devil in him, and it must be
whipped out. Does he speak loudly when spoken to by his master? Then
he is getting high-minded, and should be taken down a button-hole lower.
Does he forget to pull off his hat at the approach of a white person? Then
he is wanting in reverence, and should be whipped for it. Does he ever
venture to vindicate his conduct, when censured for it? Then he is guilty
of impudence,—one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty.
Does he ever venture to suggest a different mode of doing things from
that pointed out by his master? He is indeed presumptuous, and getting
above himself.. . T8

And it was out of this world that the slave stepped into freedom and tried
to define its dimensions.

Whether emancipation warranted deviations from the traditional code
of racial etiquette prompted sharp differences among whites and blacks
and invited immediate misunderstandings and confrontations. The way
most whites chose to view these matters, any breaches of expected behavior
or decorum in their former slaves, no matter how trivial they seemed,
threatened to disrupt the entire fabric of a society based on racial subordi-
nation. What was permissible behavior for a white person, in other words,
was not necessarily permissible behavior for a black man or woman. When
freedmen declined to remove or touch their hats upon meeting a white
person, or if they failed to stand while they spoke with whites, they were
"growing too saucy for human endurance.” When freedmen took to prome¬
nading about the streets or public places, refusing to give up the sidewalks
to every white who approached, that was "impudence” of the rankest sort.
("It is the first time in my life that I have ever had to give up the sidewalk
to a man, much less to negroes!” Eliza Andrews wrote. "I was so indignant
that I did not carry a devotional spirit to church.”) When black women
attired themselves in fancy garments, carried parasols, and insisted upon
bemg addressed as "ladies” (or "my lady” rather than "my ole woman”),
that was putting on airs”; and when black men dressed themselves con¬
spicuously, that was sufficient provocation to cut the clothes from their
backs. When white "gentlemen” engaged in hunting encountered freed¬
men "enjoying themselves in the same way” (with shotguns and a pack of
dogs), that was called still another instance of "insubordination and inso-
ience.” When freedmen staged parades, dances, and barbecues, like those
scheduled to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation, whites invari¬
ably characterized them as "orgies” or "outrageous spectacles.” When

How Free Is Free?

259

freedmen roamed about at night, disregarding the old curfew and refusing
orders to return to their quarters, that was "a terrible state of insubordina¬
tion” bordering on insurrection. And when freedmen attended meetings in
which they openly talked about "perfect equality with the whites,” acquir¬
ing land, and even voting, that was an incitement to race war. "Such
incendiary and revolutionary language,” a white Louisianan wrote of one
such meeting in New Orleans, "was enough to freeze the blood. I fear they
will have trouble there soon.” 77

What the white South characterized as "insolence,” "sauciness,” and
"putting on airs” were more often than not simply the ways many ex-slaves
chose to demonstrate their freedom. To refuse to touch their hats to whites,
to ignore their former masters or mistresses in the streets, to remain seated
while speaking with whites, or to neglect to yield the sidewalks to them
were not so much discourtesies or intended provocations as positive asser¬
tions of their new status as free men and women. But each of these actions
violated the white man’s double standard. That is, although few whites
would have thought of extending any of these social courtesies to black men
or women, they insisted that the freedmen comply, as before, with the
traditional and one-sided code of etiquette. The failure of blacks to do so,
or still worse their open refusal, constituted further evidence of how eman¬
cipation had "ruined” them and filled their heads with mistaken notions
about their place in society. "Their freedom’s made ’em so sassy there’s no
livin’ with ’em,” an exasperated North Carolinian declared. Even the usu¬
ally mild-mannered, gentlemanly Henry W. Ravenel, who had often ex¬
pressed his pleasure at the "good” conduct of the ex-slaves, could scarcely
believe what he saw during a visit to Charleston several months after the
end of the war.

It is impossible to describe the condition of the city—It is so unlike
anything we could imagine—Negroes shoving white persons off the walk
—Negro women drest in the most outre style, all with veils and parasols
for which they have an especial fancy—riding on horseback with negro
soldiers and in carriages. The negro regiments have just been paid off
which gives them money to indulge their elegant tastes ...

As if this were not bad enough, his own personal servant became "exces¬
sively insolent” after being exposed to city life. "So much for the fidelity
of indulged servants,” Ravenel sighed. "I bought him at his own request
and he had always fared as I had. I am utterly disgusted with the race, and
trust that I may some day be in a land that is purged of them.” 78

Rather than confess their sense of betrayal, many whites preferred
another explanation, one that had served them well during the war. The
"insolent” freedmen were exhibiting the natural effects of contamination
from Yankee soldiers (white and black) and northern missionaries and
teachers. After being shoved off the sidewalk by blacks, Eliza Andrews
recalled "a time when such conduct would have been rewarded with a

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

thrashing—or rather, when such conduct was unheard of, for the negroes
generally had good manners till the Yankees corrupted them.” Although
southern whites had frequently blamed "outside influences” for their trou¬
bles, the evidence now seemed more compelling than ever before, particu¬
larly with all the wild talk about granting privileges and rights to the
newly freed slaves. As a New Orleans newspaper quickly noted, only
"wicked demagogues” could induce otherwise innocent and well-behaved
blacks to entertain ideas about "rights.”

Negroes care nothing for "rights.” They know intuitively that their pig™
is in the field; their proper instruments of self-preservation, the shovel
and the hoe; their Ultima Thule of happiness, plenty to eat, a fiddle, and
a breakdown.

Sambo feels in his heart that he has no right to sit at white man’s
table; no right to testify against his betters. Unseduced by wicked dema¬
gogues, he would never dream of these impossible things

Let us trust that our Legislature will make short work of Ethiopia.
Every real white man is sick of the negro, and the "rights” of the negro.
Teach the negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves
himself, he will be protected by our white laws; if not, this Southern road
will be "a hard one to travel,” for the whites must and shall rule to the
end of time, even if the fate of Ethiopia be annihilation. 79

With some justification, white Southerners accused the North of hy¬
pocrisy in seeking to impose upon them a racial equality which most North¬
erners would have abhorred. Everyone knew, a South Carolina magistrate
averred, that in northern schools, street railways, steamers, and hotels,
racial distinctions were maintained "which we have been accustomed to
observe at the South.... This is all we ask—no more, no less, than our
northern brethren claim for themselves.” Whatever use whites made of
this charge, some came to question its veracity, particularly after watching
certain Yankee officers, missionaries, and teachers overindulge the freed-
men, mix with them socially, and encourage their "impudence.” The Rev¬
erend Samuel A. Agnew of Mississippi found incredible the reports that.
Federal authorities had fined a "gentleman” for merely "slapping a negroe
off the pavement” and that Yankees had "cruelly beaten” a white clergy¬
man "because his wife whipped a little negroe.” Apparently, Agnew con¬
cluded, "the negroe is a sacred animal. The Yankees are about negroes like
the Egyptians were about cats. Negrophilism is the passion with them.
When they come to their senses they will find that the negroe must be
governed in the same way.” But the chances of Yankees coming to their
senses seemed rather dim to Ethelred Philips, the Florida farmer and
physician, after observing in his wife’s "Lady’s book” that "the most fash¬
ionable head dress” in the North had become "the African,” because the
"very short curls” were meant to imitate the "beauty of the negro’s kin in,

of wool!” The next "rage,” he assumed, would be "to marry no other
color.” 80

How Free Is Free?

261

If the North seriously intended to recast the South in its own image,
that could conjure up all kinds of "mongrel” images in the minds of whites
already made uneasy by the actions of the freedmen. Even as some south¬
ern newspapers and orators chided the North for oppressing its own blacks,
white visitors to that region wrote home alarming reports of the veritable
Negro haven they had uncovered in Yankeedom.

Here you can see the negroe all [on an] equal footing with white man.
White man walking the streets with negro wenches. White man and
negroe riding together. White man and negroe sit in the same seat in
church or in a word the negroe enjoys the same privileges as the white

man. They address each other as Mr and Miss-I long for the day to

come when I will leave this abominable place. 81

With nearly 4,000,000 newly freed blacks in the South, as contrasted with
less than 400,000 blacks in the North, this surely was for southern whites
a most frightening vision of the future.

The specter of Africanization lurked behind every assertive move made
by blacks in the aftermath of emancipation. When they chose to test their
freedom by entering public places from which they had previously been
barred or by sitting indiscriminately in public conveyances where their
presence had previously been restricted, the worst fears of the white South
were realized and the utmost vigilance demanded. Under slavery, the body
servants or maids who accompanied their masters or mistresses into these
places or conveyances had seldom aroused any comment or controversy.
But once blacks ceased to be slaves, traveling in the company of their
owners, their presence suddenly became an intrusion and a source of con¬
tamination, symbolizing an equality most whites found threatening. With
emancipation, then, exclusion and segregation became even more firmly
embedded in the lives of black people, barring some of them from privileges
they might have exercised as slaves. That is, the context in which blacks
traveled and used public facilities became all-important, with the intermix¬
ing of races permitted only in those situations where the superiority of
whites was clearly understood. The Mississippi law of 1865 that barred
blacks from railroad cars "set apart, or used by, and for white persons” thus
exempted "Negroes or mulattoes, travelling with their mistresses, in the
capacity of nurses,” and a Savannah ordinance prohibiting blacks from
entering the public park exempted those who accompanied a white child. 82

With large numbers of freedmen on the move after emancipation, the
controversy over their use of public conveyances and their behavior on the
principal urban promenades came almost immediately to a head.

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

I have seen in a Southern street-car all blacks sitting and all whites
standing; have seen a big black woman enter a car and flounce herself
down almost into the lap of a white man; have seen white ladies pushed
off sidewalks by black men. The new manners of the blacks were painful,
revolting, absurd. The freedman’s misbehaviour was to be condoned only
by pity that accepted his inferiority as excuse. Southerners had taken
great pains and pride in teaching their negroes good manners.... It was
with keen regret that their old preceptors saw them throw all their fine
schooling in etiquette to the winds. 83

The indignity of it all was more than most whites could bear and they
quickly moved to lay down a color line that would maintain the old racial
distinctions and impress upon the newly freed slaves their place as a sepa¬
rate and inferior people. In most instances, the "color line” simply perpetu¬
ated distinctions that had been made during slavery. On the city streetcars,
blacks were forced to ride on the open platforms or in separate and spe¬
cially marked cars. (In New Orleans, for example, blacks rode only on cars
marked with a black star.) On the railroads, blacks were excluded from
first-class accommodations (the "ladies’ car”) and relegated to the smoking
compartments or to freight boxcars in which seats or benches had been
placed. On the steamboats plying the waterways and coasts, blacks were
expected to sleep on the open deck and to eat with the servants, although
they paid the same fares as white passengers. 84 Seldom written into law
(only Florida, Mississippi, and Texas thought it necessary to enact "Jim
Crow” laws in 1865 and 1866), the practices and customs governing racial
contact in public places and accommodations acquired the force of statutes,
backed as they were by a nearly unanimous white public opinion and local
police power. If any black passengers protested these inferior accommoda¬
tions, they faced the likelihood of expulsion, violence, or verbal harass¬
ment. You’re free, aint you?” a railroad conductor mocked one such
passenger. "Good as white folks, aint ye! Then pay the same fare, and keep
your mouth shut. With equal clarity, a Richmond newspaper advised
black passengers not to trouble themselves "about first claas seats until
they are fully recognized as a first class people.” 85

The restrictions imposed on the freedmen never approximated the
thoroughness with which southern legislatures and communities segre-
gated the races in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
racial distinctions that characterized the immediate post-emancipation
years were almost always understood rather than stated. But to the blacks
themselves, the differences might have seemed minimal and the risks in¬
curred in flaunting deeply rooted social customs were no less pronounced
than those which would later inhibit a successful challenge to Jim Crow
laws. What whites aspired to in both instances was a separation of the
races, and the post-emancipation restrictions were by no means limited to
public transportation. If admitted at all to public places, such as theaters
and churches, blacks sat in separate and inferior sections, usually the rear

How Free Is Free?

263

seats or the balcony. Few if any public inns or restaurants accommodated
them, except for those which catered exclusively to blacks. (The Union
Hotel in Augusta, Georgia, for example, advertised itself as a first-class
hotel "Tor the special accommodation of the Citizen and Travelling Public
of Color. ,, ) 8e Not knowing what to expect, some hotels and public inns had
considered reclassifying themselves as private houses in order to exclude
black patrons. Knowing what to expect, most blacks avoided such places
rather than be insulted and ejected. The ludicrous extent to which legisla¬
tures segregated the races later in the century was clearly anticipated in
the instructions given black people in Natchez in 1866 that henceforth the
promenades along the river and the bluff to the right of Main Street would
be reserved "for the use of the whites, for ladies and children and nurses
—the central Bluff between Main Street and State for bachelors and the
colored population, and the lower promenade for the whites.” Not far
behind, Georgia decreed that black and white patients in the "Lunatic
Asylum” be kept separate—a decision justified as "in the wisest sanitary
policy”—and in Richmond, Virginia, blacks and whites applied for "desti¬
tute rations” at separate places. 87

The determination of whites to maintain a color line in public places
and conveyances conflicted with the desire of many ex-slaves to utilize
facilities from which they had been barred and to achieve a public equality
that seemed justified by their new status. To press their demands for equal
access, blacks questioned the logic that underlay segregationist and exclu-
sionist practices. Why, for example, did black men and women traveling by
themselves in public conveyances pose a danger, whereas black maids,
nurses, and servants accompanying a white mistress or white children did
not? "If the idea is so dreadful,” a black newspaper in Georgia asked, "why
should poor little children be forced to draw sustenance from black breasts,
be kissed by black lips, and hugged by black arms?” Apparently, another
black editor suggested, colored people in the act of nursing white children
were noncontagious. Some decades would elapse before the wet nurse her¬
self became suspect. "We gave our infants to the black wenches to suckle,”
an elderly South Carolinian reflected in 1885, "and thus poisoned the blood
of our children, and made them cowards ... it will take 500 years, if not
longer, by the infusion of new blood to eradicate the hereditary vices im¬
bibed with the blood (milk is blood) of black wet nurses.” 88

By choosing to make an issue of racial separation in public places,
black men and women in the aftermath of Union occupation provoked a
prolonged and often heated controversy that sometimes spilled out into the
streets of southern communities. By 1867, on the eve of Radical Reconstruc¬
tion, blacks in such cities as Mobile, New Orleans, Savannah, Richmond,
Charleston, Nashville, and Baltimore had already challenged the ordi¬
nances, company rules, and customs barring them from or segregating
them in the horse-drawn streetcars. "For as long as distinctions will be kept
on in public manners,” the black newspaper in New Orleans announced,

264

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

"these discriminations will react on the decisions of juries and courts, and
make impartial justice a lie.” 89

If unable to obtain court injunctions against the operation of exclusive
city railway lines, blacks boarded the streetcars, ignored the conductor’s
order to leave, waited to be forcibly removed, and then sued the company
for assault and battery. Hoping to avoid such confrontations, the newly
launched City Railway Company in Charleston initially proposed to estab¬
lish separate and equal cars or to partition the same cars between blacks
and whites. But blacks rejected these proposals as demeaning and in viola¬
tion of their newly acquired civil rights and demanded nothing less than
fully integrated facilities. In April 1867, the attempt of police to eject two
blacks who had refused to leave a streetcar precipitated a riot in which
crowds of blacks tried to force their way into the police station to release
their brethren who had been arrested. The police finally restored order, the
blacks decided to press their case in the courts, and the City Railway
Company announced a month after the "riot” that it had decided to elimi¬
nate all racial distinctions on its cars. 90

Despite the force of custom and white opinion, blacks managed to win
a sufficient number of court decisions and favorable rulings from local
Union Army commanders to compel the transportation companies to re¬
consider their racial policies. Seeking to retain a semblance of distinction
between blacks and whites, the streetcar company in Richmond provided
two classes of cars, one of which would be confined to white women and
white men accompanying them while the other would be open to all per¬
sons. In a variation of that system, Richmond also established alternate
cars for white and black passengers, with the cars for the latter distinguish¬
able by a black ball perched on the roof. 91 That resembled the "black star”
cars in New Orleans, which had come under steady attack from blacks
since the early days of Union occupation. The New Orleans Tribune, the
voice of the influential colored community, not only denounced the "black
star” cars in its editorials but permitted its columns to be used to advocate
direct action: "Let every colored citizen of New Orleans, on and after the
fifteenth of August [1865], enter into any car of the C.R.R.C., and if ordered
out—take a seat, and if afterwards ejected, sue the company.” Nearly two
years later, after considerable litigation and numerous confrontations, the
superintendent of a local railway company informed the mayor that blacks
had threatened to force their way onto the cars reserved for whites "and
that should the driver resist or refuse their passage, they would compel him
to leave the car and take forcible possession themselves.” Fearing a riot,
he requested the mayor to take all measures necessary to preserve the
peace. Several days later, the chief of police issued an order forbidding any
interference with blacks riding on the streetcars. After hailing this tri¬
umph of equal justice, the black newspaper turned its editorial fire on
racial distinctions in the public schools. 92

To the blacks, freedmen and freeborn alike, the challenges to segre¬
gated seating in public conveyances were inseparable from the issues over

How Free 1$ Free?

265

which they claimed the war had been fought. But to many whites, this
flagrant disregard for racial etiquette gave rise to even more fearful appre¬
hensions about the results of emancipation and the extent to which they
would be able to exert power over the former slaves. Few whites needed to
be reminded of what was ultimately at stake. Behind every discussion and
skirmish involving racial separation lurked the specter of unrestrained
black lust and sexuality, with that most feared of consequences—racial
amalgamation or, as it was now popularly called, miscegenation. Now that
enslavement no longer marked a distinction between blacks and whites,
the implications of physical contact were sufficiently obvious to whites.
Equal access to public vehicles, theaters, restaurants, hotels, schools,
parks, and churches would eventually open the door to the home, the
parlor, and the bedroom. The absence of distinctions in public life thus
prepared the way for no distinctions at all. "If we have social equality/’ one
native white warned, "we shall have intermarriage, and if we have inter¬
marriage we shall degenerate; we shall become a race of mulattoes; we
shall be another Mexico; we shall be ruled out from the family of white
nations. Sir, it is a matter of life and death with the Southern people to
keep their blood pure.” 93

Much of the furor over racial separation in public vehicles grew out of
fears that white women and black men might otherwise find themselves
seated next to each other. In the absence of restrictions, blacks would gain
access to the "ladies’ car” (hitherto reserved for nonsmoking men and for
women) on the railroads and to the sleeping compartments on the steam¬
boats. The issue in both cases was eminently clear. On a Mississippi River
steam packet running between Memphis and Vicksburg, the white passen¬
gers applauded the action of the captain in refusing to grant a stateroom
to a black couple. Expressing his relief at the decision, one of the passengers
posed the central question to a skeptical northern visitor, "How would you
feel to know that your wife was sleeping in the next room to a nigger and
his wife?” After reflecting over that question, the visitor realized soon
enough that his fellow passengers expected no response. "The argument
was unanswerable: it was an awful thought!” As for the unwelcome couple,
they were cast ashore to wait for still another boat but their chances
seemed dim. "They won’t find a boat that’ll take ’em,” the captain declared.
"Anyhow, they can’t force their damned nigger equality on to me!” 94

In playing upon postwar fears of miscegenation, whites seemed almost
oblivious to the hypocrisy of their sudden concern for the survival of the
Anglo-Saxon race. Among others, Mary Chesnut knew better than to press
this argument too far. "Like the patriarchs of old,” she had confided to her
diary in March 1861, "our men live all in one house with their wives and
their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resem¬
ble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of
all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she
seems to think, drop from the clouds.” 95 Actually, whites made no attempt
to deny the presence of a substantial mulatto population; those transgres-

266

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

sions, however, had violated black women, not the prevailing racial code,
and they had taken place in a rigidly controlled setting, with white men
exercising a power which the prevailing relationships in their society per¬
mitted them. But in this same context, with men setting the sexual code
and regulating their own behavior, black male sexuality assumed even
more menacing proportions, precisely because it was deemed to be uncon¬
trollable.

With so much evidence to the contrary around them, blacks found it
hard to take seriously the white mem’s sudden preoccupation with racial
purity. But if whites were serious in their protestations, they were advised
to direct that concern to the principal source of the problem—themselves.
"The white man says he don’t want to be placed on equality with the
negro,” Abraham H. Galloway, a mulatto, told a convention of freedmen
in North Carolina in 1866. "Why, Sir, if you could only see him slipping
around at night, trying to get into negro women’s houses, you would be
astonished.” The other delegates indicated their agreement, one of them
shouting out, "That’s the truth, Galloway.” The New Orleans Tribune
thought it highly ironic that some of the most "devoted apostles of mis¬
cegenation” now proclaimed themselves as the principal defenders of the
white race.

When you speak of separation, it is your illegitimate children and their
unfortunate mothers that you propose to banish from among you. The
talk is idle and senseless. The attraction between both races has proved
too strong for their ever being severed.... You are ashamed of it! Why?
Because the great mass of the blacks—or more exactly of the browns—
had no liberty, no education and no social status. But now they will enjoy,
as any white man or woman, these advantages, and become your equals.

Let us tell you the truth, gentlemen: you will never let them go.

Looking to the future, a Virginia freedman testified that he apprehended
no greater danger of racial amalgamation now than during slavery. "It was
nothing but the stringent laws of the south that kept many a white man
from marrying a black woman.” He thought the strongest inclination to
interracial sexual relations still rested with whites, though he would not
deny the possibility that some blacks might wish to indulge themselves in
what whites had already made fashionable. "I will state to you as a white
lady stated to a gentleman down in Hampton, that if she felt disposed to
fall in love with or marry a black man, it was nobody’s business but hers;
and so I suppose that if the colored race get all their rights, and particularly
their equal rights before the law, it would not hurt the nation or trouble
the nation.” 96

Despite white apprehensions, few blacks rushed into sexual liaisons or
marital relationships with white partners. If anything, the abolition of
slavery tended to d iminish such contacts by freeing black women from the
whims and lusts of their masters; moreover, as a Freedmen’s Bureau agent

How Free Is Free?

267

in South Carolina reported, "young gentlemen did not want mulatto chil¬
dren sworn to them at a cost of three hundred dollars apiece.” When it
came to domestic relationships at least, blacks welcomed the implementa¬
tion of racial separation. To the charge that they coveted the daughters and
sisters of white men, Henry M. Turner replied that black men wished only
to live with and love their own women without having to fear white inter¬
vention. "What do we want with their daughters and sisters? We have as
much beauty as they. Look at our ladies, do you want more beauty than
they? The difficulty heretofore has been, our ladies were not always at our
own disposal. All we ask of the white men is to let our ladies alone, and they
need not fear us.” 97

No matter how carefully or eloquently blacks tried to clarify the differ¬
ences between "social equality” and "public equality,” insisting that they
had already suffered "social equality with a vengeance,” whites would
continue to raise the bugaboo of miscegenation and to press for legislation
to outlaw it. It was as though they could not trust themselves to heed their
own warnings. "By his loud out-cry against the dreadful thing,” the black
newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, said of the white man, "he seems to be
afraid that some of his daughters may do what a good many ofhis sons and
himself has done time and again, and therefore he wants laws made to
prevent them doing so.” 98 Actually, the white man’s rhetorical concern for
racial purity served him well by helping to mask his own complicity in its
compromise. At the same time, the obsession with miscegenation and ra¬
cial supremacy proved to be effective banners around which whites could
be mobilized to resist any encroachments on the traditional practices and
social usages governing race relations. During the next decade, whites
would be repeatedly rallied to those banners to combat the more threaten¬
ing manifestations ofblack freedom, but in the immediate aftermath of the
war they singled out for special attention the black soldier, whose contin¬
ued presence most graphically symbolized their defeat and humiliation and
whose behavior set the most dangerous example for their former slaves.

When asked to explain the origins of the rapist, Myrta Lockett Avary
immediately thought of the black soldier. "The rapist is a product of the
reconstruction period. His chrysalis was a uniform; as a soldier he could
force his way into private homes, bullying and insulting white women; he
was often commissioned to tasks involving these things. He came into life
in the abnormal atmosphere of a time rife with discussions of social equal¬
ity theories, contentions for coeducation and intermarriage.” Asked to
comment on the rampant violence that prevailed in the postwar South,
Governor Benjamin Humphreys of Mississippi thought the presence of
black troops sufficient explanation. "Everyone is afraid of the negro sol-

268

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

diers—they crowd everybody off the sidewalks, and shoot and kill us, and
protect the freedmen in their indolence and acts of crime.” Despairing over
the breakdown of the plantation labor system, Edmund Rhett of South
Carolina placed the blame directly on the influence of the black troops. "If
your desire is to restore quiet, and orderly labor to the land,” he advised
the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner in Charleston, "nothing in my judg¬
ment is more pernicious in its effect than the example, and presence of
colored troops, amongst a class of colored agricultural laborers.” 99

If Avary, Humphreys, and Rhett were oblivious to the tradition of the
white rapist and vigilante in the South and the deeper roots of violence,
sexual exploitation, and labor troubles, they nevertheless voiced the pre¬
vailing outrage and despair over the continued presence of more than
80,000 black occupation troops. Nothing seemed more contrived to humili¬
ate white manhood, insult white womanhood, and demoralize the ex-slave
than the "vindictive and revengeful” act of Federal authorities in station¬
ing black troops in their midst. Nothing could evoke more terror in a
southern community than the rumor that black troops might be sent there.
"Think of a lot of negroes being brought here to play master over us!”
young Eliza Andrews exclaimed, and few whites needed to be reminded of
the terrible implications of what she had said. Nor were they oblivious to
the fact that many of the soldiers were northern blacks who had been
raised outside the plantation tradition and discipline. "Few of them per¬
haps have had opportunities of spiritual instruction,” Henry Ravenel ob¬
served, "or of forming attachments to their masters, or of being benefitted
by that domestic relation which the presence of the master on the planta¬
tion always creates.” 100

Regardless of how they conducted themselves, black soldiers by their
very presence violated tradition and provoked a vehement response in a
people who had always viewed armed blacks as insurrectionists. After all,
a New Orleans newspaper explained, white men and women in the South
had customarily encountered blacks "only as respectful servants,” and now
they were understandably "mortified, pained, and shocked” to find some of
those same blacks in the towns and villages and on the public roads "wear¬
ing Federal uniforms, and bearing bright muskets and gleaming bayonets.
They often recognized among them those who had once been their own
servants.” Few Confederate Army veterans were able to maintain their
composure when they returned to their homes to find armed, uniformed
black men patrolling the streets, jostling their women from the sidewalks,
and claiming authority over their families. "Boy, le’ me see your gun,” a
recently paroled Confederate soldier declared with disdain as he moved to
examine the rifle of a black soldier. Not knowing what the white man’s
intentions might be, the soldier stepped back and readied his gun for
possible use. Hastily departing, the ex-Confederate murmured, "How the
war has demoralized the cussed brutes!” 101

The catalogue of "atrocities” and "daily outrages” for which black
soldiers were held responsible seemed limitless, with nearly every white

How Free Is Free?

269

man and woman prepared to relate some still more horrible tale. While
sometimes exaggerated or invented, the stories usually contained an ele¬
ment of truth; their authenticity, however, was less important than how
whites chose to define an "outrage.” The black soldier mixed indiscrimi¬
nately with whites, occasionally at "miscegenation” dinners and dances; he
did not always wait to be addressed before he deigned to speak to whites;
he might reprimand and harass whites in the city streets, perhaps even
arrest them for a trivial offense; and in several communities, he conspired
to release black prisoners from the jails, charging that they could not
obtain impartial justice, and he clashed openly with the authority of local
police. 102 No white man who witnessed the incident was likely to forget
that day in Wilmington, North Carolina, when a black sergeant arrested
the chief of police for carrying a weapon illegally and then escorted him
as a prisoner through a throng of cheering freedmen. Nor were black
soldiers immune to meting out extralegal justice if they thought local
courts and officials would fail to punish whites for offenses against black
persons. In Victoria, Texas, they entered the jail, dragged out a white man
accused of murdering a freedman, and lynched him. With equal dispatch,
black soldiers in South Carolina disposed of an ex-Confederate soldier who
had fatally stabbed a black sergeant after he had refused to leave a railway
car in which several white women sat; the soldiers tried him by "drum¬
head courtmartial” and then shot and buried him. 103

That black soldiers exercised a subversive influence on the recently
freed slaves seemed obvious to most whites. During the war, slave owners
had often blamed the massive desertions from the plantations on outside
influences, preferring to think that black soldiers "intimidated” faithful
slaves who had otherwise wished to remain in their service. And now, in
this critical period of transition, the conduct of the black troops allegedly
encouraged impressionable freedmen to defy white authority. By insulting
whites in the presence of the ex-slaves, the soldiers created erroneous
illusions of power and even superiority. By making black laborers dis¬
satisfied with their working conditions and telling them they would soon
obtain the lands of their masters, the soldiers encouraged false expecta¬
tions and the withdrawal of steady labor. By boarding the trains and street¬
cars and sitting indiscriminately in public places, they encouraged the
violation of time-honored southern customs. By their behavior, Henry
Ravenel believed, these "diabolical savages” had turned "a quiet, con¬
tented, & happy people” into "dissatisfied, unruly, madmen intoxicated
with the fumes of licentiousness, & ready for any acts of outrage.” Eliza
Andrews readily agreed, after observing events in the Georgia community
where her family resided. What appalled her was not simply that black
soldiers cursed and threatened whites on the public streets but that they
did so "while hundreds of idle negroes stood around, laughing and applaud¬
ing it.” Nor did the Reverend John H. Cornish of Mississippi think it
altogether coincidental that the day after black troops created a distur-

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

bance by violating seating arrangements in the local Baptist church, one
of his own servants suddenly turned on him. 104

Not all whites shared an excessive concern for the demoralizing impact
of black troops. On the contrary, some even hoped that such troops, if
properly disciplined, might restrain the ex-slaves by their example and
instruct them in the ways of responsible behavior. Even without black
troops, a South Carolina planter thought, the freedmen were bound to test
their newly won rights, and his fellow whites deceived themselves to think
otherwise.

There is considerable difference of opinion here as to the good or evil
influences of black troops upon the negroes. I see only this, that the
presence of the troops brings out openly what I believe was hidden in
them before. The spirit of liberty was in them and if not brought out in
this way probably would have burst out in a general insurrection ...

That was putting the best possible face on black occupation, but most
whites, if judged by their often hysterical letters and appeals to be relieved
of black troops, were unable to share the South Carolinian’s insight and
equanimity. The problem, as many whites viewed it, lay precisely in the
ability of the black troops to command the loyalty of the freedmen for
whatever purposes they deemed appropriate. In urging the removal of
those troops, the planters on Edisto and Wadmalaw islands, off the coast
of South Carolina, complained of how their presence and influence under-
mined "the little control we had over the labor.” Endorsing their petition,
a Freedmen’s Bureau officer agreed that white troops would more effectu¬
ally secure "good order” and prove less troublesome to the planter class. 105

That some black soldiers, particularly the ex-slaves, derived consider¬
able satisfaction from the power they exerted over the white population
was doubtless true. Conscious of the explosive potential in such a situation,
and not averse to placating native whites, Union Army commanders placed
restrictions on the black troops, forbade them in some areas from fraterniz¬
ing with the local blacks, and severely punished any offenses they commit¬
ted against the white populace. The tensions between black and white
soldiers frequently erupted into violent clashes, and native whites readily
exploited those antagonisms to their own advantage. "Never have I wit¬
nessed such lack of confidence as is beginning to dawn here with us,” a
black soldier wrote from Louisiana in August 1865, "and if there ever was
a time that we felt like exterminating our old oppressors from the of
the earth, it is at this present time. The overthrow of the rebellion is
consigning us to perpetual misery and distraction.” Despite their proven
service to the Union, another soldier protested, they were "still compelled
to feel that they are black, and the smooth oily tongue of the white planter
is enough to condemn any number of them .. .” 106

Not only did black soldiers complain about the insults to which white
citizens daily subjected them but their own officers rendered them virtually

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271

defenseless in responding to such provocations. It simply made no sense.
Traitors to the country, whom they had been asked to exterminate only a
few months before, suddenly became their principal accusers and, even
more disturbingly, commanded greater respect and credibility in the eyes
of the white Yankees than the black men who had fought to save the Union.
"A report from any white citizen against one of our men, whether it be
credible or not, is sufficient to punish the accused,” a black soldier charged,
and the punishments inflicted upon them were as severe as anything they
had experienced or witnessed during slavery. "Men have been bucked and
gagged in their company streets, exposed to the scorching rays of the sun
and the derision of the majority of the officers, who seem to take delight
in witnessing their misery.” By the eve of Radical Reconstruction, a white
newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina, was able to exult, "The true
soldiers, whether they wore the gray or the blue, are now united in their
opposition ... to negro government and negro equality. Blood is thicker
than water.” 107

The pride black soldiers once derived from military service quickly
dissipated. Since the end of the war, William P. Green wrote, "our task has
become more laborious, our treatment more severe,” and he saw little
reason to expect any improvement. Neither did Christian A. Fleetwood, a
sergeant major and one of the recipients of the Congressional Medal of
Honor for valiant conduct in battle. "No matter how well and faithfully
they may perform their duties,” he wrote of his fellow soldiers, "they will
shortly be considered as 'lazy nigger sojers’—as drones in the great hive.”
Rather than "remain in a state of marked and acknowledged subservi¬
ency,” he decided that he might better serve his race outside the Army.
Like Fleetwood, many blacks asked to be discharged rather than serve as
second-class soldiers under the command of white men who no longer made
any attempt to mask their racial antipathies. 108

If disillusionment drove many blacks out of the Army, the mounting
aggression and hostility of white citizens made life intolerable for those
who remained. Even before the war had ended, the white South placed no
higher premium on any demand than the removal of the black troops from
their midst. "Why are these savages still kept here to outrage & insult our
people?” Henry Ravenel asked. The matter assumed greater urgency with
every new report of an "outrage” and every new rumor of an impending
black insurrection. "They were taught during the war that it was their
duty to kill the whites & they cant learn now that the war is over,” Ravenel
confided to his journal. "Their shooting propensities still continue strong,
showing a tendency toward reversion to the savage state.” Finding that
reports of "outrages” secured results, whites besieged Federal authorities
with their protests and petitions, often with the backing of local Union
Army commanders and Freedmen’s Bureau agents. And with President
Johnson adopting an avowedly conciliatory policy, the demobilization of
black troops proceeded rapidly. By 1866, most of them had been mustered
out of service or transferred to posts outside the South. The nightmare had

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ended, Governor Humphreys of Mississippi seemed to suggest in his report
to the legislature; the removal of black troops had freed the white race from
insults, irritations and spoliation,” while the ex-slaves were now free to
pursue "habits of honest industry” and to enjoy the "friendship and confi¬
dence” of their former masters. 109

Now that they were being discharged, the black soldiers lined up to
receive the appropriate papers and their final pay. Around many of the
camps, guards had been posted with orders to exclude peddlers, who were
said to be lying in wait. "Beware of these unprincipled knaves!” a black
newspaper warned of the "modem Shylocks” who sought to swindle the
soldiers out of their discharge pay. But the black veteran had far more to
fear than peddlers as he left his camp and entered civilian life. If he
remained in the South, he entered a society in which the dominant popula-
tion only grudgingly recognized his freedom, refused to admit him as an
equal, and remembered all too vividly his service in the Union Army. To
many whites, at least, he was a traitor and more than likely a potential
troublemaker. As a soldier, he had been feared; as a civilian, he seemed no
less dangerous. A prominent South Carolinian had predicted a race war if
the troops were not removed; now that they had been mustered out, an¬
other South Carol ini a n feared the discharged black soldier would contrib¬
ute his services to the agitation for land. 110

Although the black soldier had fought to preserve the Union, he found
himself with less voice in the government, in the courts of law, and in the
work place than those he had only recently vanquished. "The great ques¬
tion with us is: Shall traitors to our country hold the balance of power
again? a black minister in North Carolina asked. "I give you the unequivo¬
cating answer, No! They shall die so dead, so dead, so dead.” Not nearly as
confident, a black veteran in Beaufort, South Carolina, addressed an appeal
to President Johnson, reiterating his devotion to the Union and requesting
some clarification of black freedom. "We Want to Know Some thing A
Bought our Rites.” But as the President’s policy for the South unfolded,
J. H. Payne, a black sergeant stationed in North Carolina, found himself
placing what faith he had left in God rather than in Andrew Johnson.

I remember reading an old history one time, where there was a certain
king who had signed an unalterable decree for the destruction of a cer¬
tain race of people; and yet, through the instrumentality and prayers of
a certain woman, the great curse was removed. So let there be days of
fasting and prayer proclaimed ... among the colored race, and let them
call upon the name of Elijah’s God, until the fulness of their rights is
maintained.... 0! that God would awaken in us a spirit of independence
to ask of the white man no favors but ask all from God

Whether blacks appealed to Johnson or to God, the results were less than
reassuring. Not only did the veteran find himself restricted in his access
to public facilities, the ballot, and the jury box but his military service

How Free Is Free?

273

made him an obvious target for the frustrations of whites. "When they
commenced mustering out the colored troops,” one veteran recalled, "they
told us to go back as close to the old masters as we could get. I didn't like
that much. Then the next hard times that come up was the mobbing and
lynching of Negroes.” 111

To former slaves who had served in the Union Army, the question of
what they should do with themselves after leaving military service defied
any easy resolution. "I didn't want to be under the white folks again,” a
former Tennessee slave and soldier remembered as his most vivid thought
at that time. Three soldiers on active duty in South Carolina typified the
dilemma of others as they prepared in 1866 to return to civilian life. None
of them relished the idea of returning to the old plantations where they had
worked as slaves, particularly if any of them had fled to join the Army.
Having seen too many hired men "turned off without being paid,” Melton
R. Lenton wanted to avoid contract labor. "They try to pull us down faster
than we can climb up.” He thought his military service entitled him to a
plot of land, as did his previous labor for white men. "They have no reason
to say that we will not work, for we raised them, and sent them to school,
and bought their land, and now it is as little as they can do to give us some
of their land—be it little or much.” H. D. Dudley, who had risen to the rank
of sergeant, recalled that, in the battles he had fought, racial distinctions
had no place. "That was so in battle, but it is not so now. If any man believes
that there is no distinction in regard to color now, let him approach the
cars, or enter a hotel or a steamboat, and he will be set right upon that
matter.” Like Sergeant Dudley, W. W. Sanders wondered if he had reaped
any rewards for his years of service. He doubted it. "It seems that all our
fighting has done us but little good. Our politicians and leading men seem
to be doing but little for us. Our trust is in God and our own good conduct.
Let us convince the world that we are worthy to enjoy the rights we ask
for.” Whether he would be in any position to prove anything remained a
troublesome question. 112

If many whites thought the former soldier a potentially dangerous
citizen, they were in less agreement about his desirability as a laborer.
Despite the proscriptions visited upon allegedly exploitative peddlers at
the army camps, no such restrictions were placed on planters and specula¬
tors, many of whom inundated the military installations around discharge
time with contracts in hand, eager for the services of the blacks. "The negro
was king,” a northern traveler wrote after witnessing the ways in which
Mississippi and Louisiana planters had descended upon a black regiment
being mustered out near Natchez.

Men fawned upon him; took him to the sutler’s shop and treated him;
carried pockets full of tobacco to bestow upon him; carefully explained
to him the varied delights of their respective plantations. Women came
too—with coach and coachmen—drove into the camp, went out among
the negroes, and with sweet smiles and honeyed words sought to per-

274

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

suade them that such and such plantations would be the very home they
were looking for.

Ironically, some planters thought them more desirable laborers because
they had been soldiers and might be able to exert restraint and discipline
on the other workers. For that reason, the higher the rank, the better offer
a black veteran might expect. "I told a nigger officer that I’d give him thirty
dollars a month just to stay on my plantation and wear his uniform,”
remarked a substantial planter from Jackson, Mississippi. "The fellow did
it, and I’m havin’ no trouble with my niggers. They’re afraid of the shoul¬
der-straps.” 113

If black soldiers had known what awaited them in civilian life, they
might have kept more than their uniforms upon being mustered out of the
Army. The rewards of plantation labor would prove disappointing; whites
retained economic power and returned political and police power to those
who had wielded it before the war; and as black dissatisfaction mounted,
so did the white man’s recourse to physical violence, legal repression, and
vigilante justice. For many freedmen, self-preservation took precedence
over self-employment. "As one of the disfranchised race,” a Louisiana black
advised, "I would say to every colored soldier, 'Bring your gun home.’ ” 114

Several months after the end of the war, two white men overtook an
elderly black woman who had insisted on leaving her former master’s
plantation near Washington, Georgia. While one of the men shot her, the
other broke her ribs and beat her on the head with a stone until she died;
they left her body unburied in a secluded spot. Ten days later, the body was
discovered and military authorities arrested the two assailants. Whether
the brutal murder or the subsequent arrests excited more public indigna¬
tion and concern is not entirely clear. "She certainly was an old fool,” Fljy, a
Andrews said of the victim, "but I have never yet heard that folly was a
capital offense.” Judge Garnett Andrews, Eliza’s father and a former state
legislator who had opposed secession, agreed to defend the two men
charged with the crime, not because he approved of their deed but because
he felt they deserved a fair trial. He said very little about the case, his
daughter observed, "because conversation on such subjects nearly always
brings on a political row in the family.”

Although Eliza Andrews thought the murder had been "a very ugly
affair,” her sympathies almost instinctively went out to the accused. After
all, "there is only negro evidence for all these horrors, and nobody can tell
how much ofit is false.” As for the two defendants, one of them was a famil y
man whose "poor wife is ... almost starving herself to death from grief”
and whose children were reportedly frightened into convulsions when the

How Free Is Free?

275

soldiers arrested their father, while the other was a twenty-year-old youth
whose "poor old father hangs around the courtroom, putting his head in
every time the door is opened, trying to catch something of what is going
on.” Judge Andrews thought it unfortunate that the trial should take place
at this time, for the Yankees would no doubt "believe everything the
negroes say and put the very worst construction on it.” His daughter
agreed. "Brutal crimes happen in all countries now and then,” she confided
to her journal, "especially in times of disorder and upheaval such as the
South is undergoing, but the North, fed on Mrs. Stowe’s lurid pictures, likpg
to believe that such things are habitual among us, and this horrible occur¬
rence will confirm them in their opinion.”

Eliza Andrews made no mention of the verdict handed down in the
murder case, except to note that her father believed one of the defendants
would surely hang and entertained little hope of saving the other. But she
did record still another "unfortunate affair” that occurred at the same timo
in adjoining Lincoln County. Having learned that freedmen were holding
a secret meeting, "which was suspected of boding no good to the whites,”
a group of local youths resolved to break up the gathering; one of them, in
his attempt to frighten the blacks, "accidentally” shot and killed a woman.
"He didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Miss Andrews had heard, "but the
Yankees vow they will hang the whole batch if they can find them. Fortu¬
nately he has made his escape, and they don’t know the names of the
others.”

Corrie Calhoun says that where she lives, about thirty miles from here,
over in Carolina, the men have a recipe for putting troublesome negroes
out of the way that the Yankees can’t get the key to. No two go out
together, no one lets another know what he is going to do, and so, when
mischievous negroes are found dead in the woods, nobody knows who
killed them. 115

Many freedmen quickly discovered in the aftermath of emancipation
how much more vulnerable and expendable their lives had suddenly
become. "Nigger life’s cheap now,” a white Tennessean observed. "Nobody
likes ’em enough to have any affair of the sort [murder] investigated; and
when a white man feels aggrieved at anything a nigger’s done, he just
shoots hi m and puts an end to it.” 116 Whether previously expressed in
martial displays, bellicose oratory, battlefield valor, family feuds, personal
vengeance, or in the whipping of slaves, violence lay close to the surface
of southern life and culture. Neither whites nor blacks had been exempt
from its influence, whether as perpetrators or victims, and the prevalence
of frontier conditions, the remoteness of many regions from local govern¬
ment and military occupation, the memories of the Lost Cause, and the felt
need to control and discipline freed blacks militated against any decline of
violence in the postwar years.

The question of how a highly volatile white population might respond

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

to emancipation had been an immediate concern of nearly every freedman
and freedwoman. During slavery, they had been exposed to violence on the
plantations and farms where they worked and from the dreaded patrollers
if they ventured off those plantations. But the financial investment each
of them represented had operated to some degree as a protective ghioH
Before the war, a Tennessee farmer explained, the slave "was so much
property. It was as if you should kill or maim my horse. But now the nigger
has no protection.” With black men and women no longer commanding a
market price, the value placed on black life declined precipitately, and the
slaves freed by the war found themselves living among a people who had
suffered the worst possible ignominy—military defeat and "alien” occupa¬
tion. Many whites, moreover, thought the abolition of slavery had doomed
the African race in the South to extinction, and all too many of them
seemed eager to expedite that prophecy. "If I could get up tomorrow morn¬
ing and hear that every nigger in the country was dead, I’d just jump up
and down,” the wife of a South Carolina planter exclaimed after hearing
that Yankee soldiers had recently shot several blacks who were "getting
very impudent.” 117

The apparent indifference with which some whites regarded the fate
of the ex-slave dismayed many visitors to the postwar South. "He is actu¬
ally to many of them nothing but a troublesome animal,” Sidney Andrews
wrote from South Carolina; "not a human being, with hopes and longings
and feelings... 'I would shoot one just as soon as I would a dog,’ said a man
to me yesterday on the cars. And I saw one shot at in Columbia as if he had
been only a dog,—shot at from the door of a store, and at midday!” Nor did
visitors find this behavior confined, as they had expected, to the lower
classes of whites; in many instances, it reached into the highest circles of
southern society. In Alabama, for example, a planter found himself em¬
broiled in a controversy with one of his former slaves over ownership of a
horse left behind by the Yankees; the evidence clearly favored the freed¬
man s claim, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent agreed and awarded him
the horse, but the former master thought otherwise and for him the issue
obviously went beyond rightful ownership of the animal. "A nigger has no
use for a horse like that,” he explained. "I just put my Spencer to Sip’s
head, and told him if he pestered me any more about that horse, I’d kill
him. He knew I was a man of my word, and he never pestered me any
more.” The planter enjoyed a reputation in the community as a just, up¬
right, and honorable man, and that fact disturbed the visitor more than
anything else. "No doubt if I had had dealings with him I should have found
him so. He meant to give the freedmen their rights, but he was only
beginning dimly to perceive that they had any rights; and when it came to
treating a black man with absolute justice, he did not know the meaning
of the word. If a "just and upright” man could have so little regard for the
rights of the freedmen, their fate in the hands of less paternalistic whites
suggested a difficult and violent period ahead. 118

How many black men and women were beaten, flogged, mu tilate and

How Free Is Free?

277

murdered in the first years of emancipation will never be known. Nor could
any accurate body count or statistical breakdown reveal the barbaric sav¬
agery and depravity that so frequently characterized the assaults made on
freedmen in the name of restraining their savagery and depravity—the
severed ears and entrails, the mutilated sex organs, the burnings at the
stake, the forced drownings, the open display of skulls and severed limbs
as trophies. "The negro was murdered, beheaded, skinned, and his skin
nailed to the barn/’ a Freedmen’s Bureau officer wrote of a case in Missis¬
sippi, as he supplied the names of the murderers and asked for an investiga¬
tion. Reporting on "outrages” committed in Kentucky, a Bureau officer
confined himself to several counties and only to those cases in which he had
sworn testimony, the names of the injured, the names of the alleged offend¬
ers, and the dates and localities.

I have classified these outrages as follows: Twenty-three cases of severe
and inhuman beating and whipping of men; four of beating and shooting;
two of robbing and shooting; three of robbing; five men shot and killed;
two shot and wounded; four beaten to death; one beaten and roasted;
three women assaulted and ravished; four women beaten; two women
tied up and whipped until insensible; two men and their families beaten
and driven from their homes, and their property destroyed; two instances
of burning of dwellings, and one of the inmates shot.

Because of the difficulty in obtaining evidence and testimony, the officer
stressed that his report included only a portion of the crimes against freed¬
men. "White men, however friendly to the freedmen, dislike to make depo¬
sitions in these cases, for fear of personal violence. The same reason
influences the black—he is fearful, timid, and trembling. He knows that
since he has been a freedman he has not, up to this time, had the protection
of either the federal or State authorities; that there is no way to enforce
his rights or redress his wrongs.” 110

Neither a freedman’s industriousness nor his deference necessarily
protected him from whites if they suspected he harbored dangerous tenden¬
cies or if they looked upon him as a "smart-assed nigger” who needed
chastisement. "The fact is,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in North Carolina
reported, "it’s the first notion with a great many of these people, if a Negro
says anything or does anything that they don't like, to take a gun and put
a bullet into him, or a charge of shot.” In those instances where the reasons
for an assault on blacks could be determined, the provocations ranged from
disagreements over wages, working conditions, and the quality of work
performed to the presence of black troops, black political and religious
meetings, resistance to punishment, and suspicion of theft, murder, and
rape. What proved even more alarming were the numerous instances of
violence in which no reason could be easily ascertained, except perhaps the
frustration of military defeat and emotional and recreational deprivation.
The ferocity of the attacks on freedmen and the ecstasy with which the

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

mobs meted out their punishment reached a point where it dismayed as
many native whites as northern visitors and Freedmen’s Bureau officers.
"The American Indian,” wrote a white public official in Georgia, "is not
more delighted at the writhings and shrieks of his victim at the stake, than
many Georgians are at the agonizing cries of the African negro at the
whipping post.” 120

The violence inflicted upon freedmen seldom bore any relationship to
the gravity of the alleged provocation. Of the countless cases of postwar
violence, in fact, the largest proportion related in some way to that broad
and vaguely defined charge of conduct unbecoming black people—that is,
"putting on airs,” "sassiness,” "impudence,” "insolence,” "disrespect,” "in¬
subordination,” contradicting whites, and violating racial customs. Behav¬
ior which many blacks and outside observers deemed relatively inoffensive
might be regarded by certain native whites as deserving of a violent cen¬
sure. "The truth is,” a Tennessee farmer explained, "a white man can’t
take impudence from ’em. It may be a long ways removed from what you
or I would think impudence, but these passionate men call it that, and pitch
in.” Near Corinth, Tennessee, for example, "an old nigger” working in a
sawmill "got his head split open with an axe” for having "sassed” a white
man. Near Fredericksburg, Virginia, a white man shot and wounded a
former black soldier after overhearing him "boast” of his service in the
Union Army. In South Carolina, a former slave was shot for requesting
that a Federal officer examine the contract he had negotiated with his
employer, and still other blacks were beaten for no greater offense than
refusing to sign a contract. "You must expect such things to happen when
the niggers are impudent,” a South Carolinian said of reports of violence
in his state, but a white farmer who overheard the remark thought other¬
wise. "The niggers a’n’t to blame,” he explained. "They’re never impudent,
unless they’re trifled with or imposed on. Only two days ago a nigger was
walking along this road, as peaceably as any man you ever saw. He met a
white man right here, who asked him who he belonged to. 'I don’t belong
to anybody now,’ he says; T’m a free man.’ 'Sass me? you black devil!’ says
the white fellow; and he pitched into him, and cut him in four or five places
with his knife. I heard and saw the whole of it, and I say the nigger was
respectful, and that the white fellow was the only one to blame.” 121

Much of the violence inflicted on the freedmen had been well orga¬
nized, with bands of white men meting out extralegal "justice” and antici¬
pating the Klan-type groups that would operate so effectively during
Radical Reconstruction. The names by which these paramilitary self-styled
vigilantes were known varied from place to place—"reformers,” "regula¬
tors, moderators,” "rangers”—but the tactics of random terrorism and
assassination they employed barely differed and they tended to attract men
of all social classes. The "justice” they enforced resembled that of the
hastily formed mobs who lynched blacks suspected of more serious offenses
like rape, murder, and arson. With increasing regularity, however, white
terrorists focused their violence on blacks in leadership positions who sym-

How Free Is Free?

279

bolized to them the excesses of the present and the dangers of the future
—teachers, clergymen, soldiers, and political activists. In Opelika, Ala¬
bama, four local whites repeatedly beat and stabbed Robert Alexander, a
twenty-six-year-old black minister, leaving him close to death. No black
schools would be allowed in the community, they warned him, nor would
they tolerate the presence of a black preacher who stirred up the people.
When Henry M. Turner, an organizer for the African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Georgia, met him several days later, the Reverend Alexander
resembled "a lump of curdled blood,” and the local Freedmen’s Bureau
agent had refused to intervene in the case. "The picture is too sad for me
to draw,” Turner wrote. "O God! where is our civilization? Is this Christen¬
dom, or is it hell? Pray for us.” If black teachers and clergymen were not
themselves mobbed or threatened, their schoolhouses and churches were
often burned to the ground, and black pupils were apt to be assaulted or
intimidated even when attending separate schools. Some years after the
New Orleans race riot of 1866, Douglass Wilson, a former black soldier,
could still vividly recall the anxiety with which parents had sent their
children to school, not knowing what they might encounter.

We had no idea that we should see them return home alive in the eve¬
ning. Big white boys and half-grown men used to pelt them with stones
and run them down with open knives, both to and from school. Some¬
times they came home bruised, stabbed, beaten half to death, and some¬
times quite dead. My own son himself was often thus beaten. He has on
his forehead to-day a scar over his right eye which sadly tells the story
of his trying experience in those days in his efforts to get an education.

I was wounded in the war, trying to get my freedom, and he over the eye,
trying to get an education. 122

Charging that northern propagandists distorted or even fabricated
stories of "outrages” in the South, some whites chose not to believe any of
them, while others ascribed them to lower-class whites or defended them
as a proper response to black impudence and lawlessness. "Don’t you be¬
lieve your 'eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses’ of our cruelty,” a prominent
North Carolina woman advised her friend in Connecticut. "Exceptional
cases there are no doubt, as in everything, but believe me, nine hundred
and ninety in every thousand of our people are kindly disposed to them, and
if they behave themselves will befriend them.” It was grossly unfair to the
South, an irate planter observed, for newspaper reporters to view "solitary
instances” of brutality as typical of "the condition of the niggers and the
disposition of the whites.” After all, he added, if "some impudent darkey,
who deserves it, gets a knock on the head,” that did not mean "that every
nigger in the South is in danger of being killed.” With absolute confidence,
a magistrate in South Carolina insisted that blacks faced no danger to their
lives unless they themselves provoked it. 123

Even allowing for some exaggeration in the news accounts of white

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"atrocities,” the number of assaults and murders never reported, whether
because of fear of retaliation or the disappearance of the victims, approx¬
imated or exceeded those later found to be unfounded or distorted. Without
intending to do so, a Georgia farmer suggested the difficulty in accurately
measuring the full extent of white violence.

A heap of ’em [freedmen] out in my country get into the swamps and get
lost. I don’t know as it’s true, but I’ve heard that there’s men out there
that haven’t got anything else to do, and if you mention any nigger to
’em, and give ’em twelve dollars, the nigger’s sure to be lost in a very few
days.

I know four right here in Barnwell that have been drowned some
way within the last two months. Niggers never were so careless before.

They go into the swamps and nobody can find out anything about ’em till
by-and-bye they’re seen floating down the river. Going to the coast, I
reckon; that’s where they’re fond of going.

After reporting the brutal rape of a black woman, in which the attackers
had vowed vengeance on the families of men who had served in the "God
damned Yankee army,” the black newspaper in Savannah declared that, all
too often such reports were suppressed, lest they incriminate the entire
white population and "make capital” for the Radicals. "This is a miserable
plea,” the editor wrote, "for shielding criminals and thwarting the de¬
mands of justice.” Nor could whites explain away the violence by placing
the onus on the so-called dregs of the white population. To do so would have
slighted some of the best families and demeaned their contribution to the
maintenance of racial solidarity. Although "gentlemen” and "ladies”
tended to deplore the excesses, many of them assumed an indifference that
came close to approval or sympathy. No matter how hard some whites
claimed to have tried, it remained difficult for them to view the murder of
a black person as comparable to the murder of a white. The wave of postwar
violence in Wilkes County, Georgia, for example, prompted considerable
outrage among "the more respectable class” of whites and resulted in a
protest meeting. "This class is ashamed of such outrages,” a Freedmen’s
Bureau officer observed, "but it does not prevent them, and it does not take
them to heart; and I could name a dozen cases of murder committed on the
colored people by young men of these first families.” 124

When violence reached the dimensions of race war, few could remain
indifferent. Emancipation introduced into the South a phenomenon al¬
ready well known to Northerners—the race riot. Appropriately, the first
such outbreaks—in Charleston and Norfolk in 1865—pitted white Union
soldiers against black soldiers and freedmen. By 1867, however, native
whites had fought freedmen in the streets of several southern cities and
towns, among them Charleston, Norfolk, Richmond, Atlanta, Memphis,
and New Orleans. Whatever the precipitating incident, nearly every riot
reflected that growing conflict between how ex-slaves and whites chose to

How Free Is Free?

281

define emancipation and the determination of whites to retain the essen¬
tials of the old discipline and etiquette. 125

The most far-reaching disturbances broke out in Memphis in early
May 1866 and in New Orleans several months later. In Memphis, trouble
began when freedmen and recently discharged black soldiers clashed with
local police over the arrest of a black man; the forcible release of the
prisoner triggered pent-up emotions and frustrations, aggravated by large
numbers of black refugees, economic distress, and the enforcement of va¬
grancy laws. The riot took the lives of forty-six blacks (including two chil¬
dren and three women) and two white men (a policeman and a fireman),
with many of the casualties incurred when white mobs invaded the black
section of the city and burned homes, churches, and schoolhouses while
terrorizing the residents. The Union Army commander, who had demobil¬
ized many of the black soldiers stationed near Memphis, initially refused
to intervene to halt the violence, explaining to the local Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau agent that "he had a large amount of public property to guard; that
a considerable part of the troops he had were not reliable; that they hated
Negroes too.” While applauding his actions ("He knows the wants of the
country, and sees the negro can do the country more good in the cotton
fields than in the camp”), the local newspaper also expressed satisfaction
with the overwhelming lesson taught by the riot. "The late riots in our city
have satisfied all of one thing: that the southern men will not be ruled by
the negro.... The negroes now know, to their sorrow, that it is best not to
arouse the fury of the white man.” 126

The pattern of race rioting seldom varied in these years. When rela¬
tions between the freedmen and the whites reached a breaking point, the
slightest incident might be seized as a pretext for an organized assault upon
the entire black community. In New Orleans, tension had mounted over
warring political factions, the convening of a constitutional convention in
1866, and the aggressive demands of the colored community. When black
laborers paraded to press their demands for equal suffrage on the conven¬
tion, that was sufficient provocation. Confronted by a mob ofhostile whites,
the paraders dispersed, street fighting broke out, and numerous delegates
and black spectators trying to flee the convention hall were shot and killed.
By the end of the affray, 48 men had been killed and 166 wounded, and
Federal authorities had distinguished themselves largely by their indeci¬
sion and belated intervention. What began as a "riot,” a congressional
inquiry later concluded, ended as a "massacre.” 127

If the postwar riots and violence were intended to teach the freedman
"not to arouse the fury of the white man,” they taught him that and
considerably more. Law enforcement agencies and officers, if not co-con-
spirators in violating the civil rights of ex-slaves, might be expected to
protect or ignore the violators. Neither the Union Army nor the Freed-
men’s Bureau could be trusted to afford them adequate protection; instead,
Union troops in some localities alternated with native whites as the princi¬
pal aggressors. To seek a redress of grievances in the courts of law, as many

282

BEEN IN THE STOBM SO LONG

freedmen also quickly discovered, resulted invariably in futility if not per¬
sonal danger.

Nothing seemed better designed to drive blacks into total exasperation
and ultimately into lawlessness than the law itself. In the experience of
many freedmen at least, the differences between the law and lawlessness
often became so blurred as to be indistinct. Not surprisingly, the legal
system and its enforcement agents reflected, as they always had, the domi¬
nation and the will of the white man. Few voiced that conviction more
eloquently than an illiterate rural delegate to a freedmen’s convention in
Raleigh, North Carolina. Although confessing his "ignorance” and lack of
skill in oratory, he insisted upon sharing his observations with the other
delegates.

Yes, yes, we are ignorant. We know it. I am ignorant for one, and they
say all niggers is. They say we don’t know what the word constitution
means. But if we don’t know enough to know what the Constitution is,
we know enough to know what justice is. I can see for myself down at my
own court-house. If they makes a white man pay five dollars for doing
something today, and makes a nigger pay ten dollars for doing that thing
tomorrow, don’t I know that ain’t justice? They’ve got a figure of a woman
with a sword hung up thar, sir; Mr. President, I don’t know what you call
it—["Justice,” "Justice,” several delegates shouted}—well, she’s got a
handkercher over her eyes, and the sword is in one hand and a pair o’
scales in the other. When a white man and a nigger gets into the scales,
don 11 know the nigger is always mighty light? Don’t we all see it? Ain’t
it so at your court-house, Mr. President? 128

Upon examining the quality of postwar justice, some blacks compared
it unfavorably to what they had known as slaves. The comparison revealed
far more about the bleakness of the present than the brightness of the past
Although the slave codes had imposed penalties on slave owners who failed
to treat their slaves humanely or who killed them maliciously, the protec¬
tion such provisions afforded black men and women had been minimal
largely because they could neither file a formal complaint nor testify
against a white person; moreover, the need to maintain racial unity and
control made white witnesses reluctant to testify and white juries even
more reluctant to convict. 129

While blacks had been slaves, the self-interest, if not the paternal
instincts, of the master had often prompted his intervention to protect his
property. Our former masters,” a group of Richmond blacks declared after
the war, did once protect us from the tyrant that now rules in the Mayor’s
Court, and those who sit in the Hustings Court and those in the jury box.

How Free Is Free?

283

because we were their property.” This same point was made repeatedly by
former slaveholders, as if to warn their now emancipated slaves of the
fragile nature of their freedom and to impress upon them their state of
dependency. Before emancipation, an Alabama judge observed in 1865,
•'the wrong done by a third party to a negro, was a wrong done to the owner
or master, and the negro was merged in the Master, the black man in the
white man—and the controversy^was really between the two, although a
third person was involved. The white man, recognized as master, felt a
pride in the very dependence of the slave—the slave must appear thro’ the
master in court, in all contracts. He could not speak, act, or be spoken to
or acted with, except by the consent, express or implied, of the owner.” A
Georgia newspaper editor made the point even more precisely: "when
detected in his frequent delinquencies, Sambo will now have no 'maussa’
to step in between him and danger.” 130

But in some crucial respects emancipation made little difference.
Whether dealing with slaves or freedmen, southern courts and jurists sel¬
dom wavered from the urgent need to solidify white supremacy, ensure
proper discipline in blacks, and punish severely those who violated the
racial code. In his charge to a postwar jury, a South Carolina judge
managed to combine these imperatives with the old paternalism.

We belong to the master race of mankind—that race which, ruling all the
waters of the world, its seas and oceans, without dispute, dominates
equally upon the land, and plants its yoke at will upon the neck of all the
other tribes and kindreds and races of men. We make, we administer the
law. We judge; we have all the responsibility of superior power—of
power. How appealingly, then, does every sentiment of magnanimity
persuade us to exercise that power justly, forbearingly, mercifully, kindly
and charitably, whether on the Bench or in the Jury box, or in the
common affairs of life.

Whatever the magnanimous spirit in which the judge made his charge, the
judicial system rarely reflected it. Even the most conscientious jurists, who
were able to reconcile their belief in white supremacy with a commitment
to equal justice and protection for blacks, often had to confess their help¬
lessness. Julius J. Fleming, for example, a magistrate and lawyer in
Sumter, South Carolina, conceded that despite his best efforts, wrongs were
inflicted upon freedmen "with absolute impunity,” few of them had the
funds to meet litigation costs, and many of them were swindled out of legal
claims to wages because they could not post the necessary bond as plain¬
tiffs. "It is a stupendous wrong to emancipate & then desert them,” Flem¬
ing concluded. "The master’s interest was once their protection—but that
is now gone. My interest in their behalf has not added to my business or
popularity—but I care not.” 131

Until the civil courts were thought to be ready to protect the legal
rights of the freedmen, the provost courts (operating under military au-

284

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

thority) and the Freedmen’s Bureau dispensed justice in the postwar
South. While in many ways fairer toward the freedmen, the quality of that
justice varied according to the competence and commitment of the particu¬
lar officers and depended on their success in securing the cooperation of the
Union Army to enforce their decisions. Like many such officials, John De
Forest, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina, thought his primary
obligation was to teach the whites to accord equal protection under the law
to the freed slaves. "I so interpreted my orders as to believe that my first
and great duty lay in raising the blacks and restoring the whites of my
district to a confidence in civil law.” When Cato Allums, a freedman, shot
and killed a white man in self-defense, De Forest permitted civil author-
ities to handle the case. But he followed their actions carefully, warned
them that they were on trial as much as the freedman, and attempted in
every way to protect Allums rights whan he was indicted for murder. The
refusal of several white witnesses to testify ultimately resulted in the
dismissal of the indictment. De Forest hailed the outcome as "a triumph
of justice, public conscience, and public sense” and a vindication of his
decision to allow local whites to resume judicial power. Although grateful
for his release, Allums resented his lengthy confinement and the expenses
he incurred in his defense. Unlike De Forest, he deemed the outcome less
than a triumph of white justice. "I never was treated like most niggers
was,’’he told De Forest. "Mighty few white men has tried to ride over
Cato.” By 1866, in most sections of the South, civil courts had resumed their
jurisdiction, although the Freedmen’s Bureau reserved the right to inter¬
vene if it thought blacks had been denied impartial justice. That it seldom
did so revealed more about the predilections of Bureau officers than the
impartiality of civil justice. 132

After their initial experiences with the judicial system, many freed¬
men found little reason to place any confidence in it. The laws discrimi¬
nated against them, the courts upheld a double standard of justice, and the
police acted as the enforcers. Arrested often for the most trivial offenses
(for which whites would rarely be apprehended), blacks found themselves
m jail for months without a trial, denied the right to competent counsel
(lawyers feared losing their white clients), charged exorbitant legal fees
and sentenced as much for their race as for the nature of their crime 133
Upon entering the town of Selma, Alabama, a northern journalist came
acr oss a gang of black prisoners at work in the street, each of them linked
to the other by a long chain. Anxious to learn what they had done to
deserve such "ignominious” punishment, he obtained a list of their crimes,
the most serious of which was "using abusive language towards a white
man ; the other offenses included disorderly conduct, vagrancy, petty
theft, and selling farm produce within the town limits (the offender had
been unable to pay his fine of twenty dollars). "But it was a singular fact ”
the visitor learned, "that no white men were ever sentenced to the chain-
f ang ’~'i g ’ 1 suppose, all virtuous.” The all-black chain gang, like the
two Bibles required in some courtrooms, one for white witnesses and the

How Free Is Free?

285

other for black witnesses, symbolized all too graphically the kind of justice
many freedmen had come to expect. 134

If only because they feared Federal intervention, some courts made
scrupulous attempts to guard the rights of accused blacks. But the infre¬
quency with which whites were apprehended, tried, and convicted of
crimes against freedmen made a mockery of equal justice and encouraged
still more white violence. At nearly every step in the judicial process, the
victims of such violence found themselves frustrated, even in swearing out
a complaint against a white man.

It is difficult to get an officer to arrest a white man when he has assaulted
and beaten a colored man; the magistrates will not give warrants for the
arrest of white men without long interrogation. We are bound to know
a stranger’s name—if not, no warrant, when he is white; but if he be
colored, they will quickly give warrants that the colored man may be put
in jail. Oh, how quickly the officers will catch him!

To lodge a complaint against a white person was also to invite harassment
and sometimes violence. "The idea of a nigger having the power of bringing
a white man before a tribunal!” a Georgian exclaimed. "The Southern
people a’n’t going to stand that.” Moreover, as a Freedmen’s Bureau officer
in Alabama observed, anyone making a complaint had to provide bail to
appear as a witness or be kept in jail until the trial. "As no white man will
give bail for a negro to appear as a witness against a white man, and as they
don’t fancy lying perhaps weeks in jail in order to be heard, they prefer to
suffer wrong rather than seek redress.” 135

Even when the names of the offenders were known, whites could be
expected to abide by a "gentlemen’s agreement” not to cooperate with the
authorities in apprehending them, and the police were often less than
eager to pursue the matter and in some instances conspired to effect the
escape of a white prisoner accused of a serious crime. When murders were
committed, neighbors and friends would invariably hide the offenders, and
few men possessed the necessary courage to expose the guilty parties lest
they share the same fate. Without military protection for himself and the
witnesses, no freedman could be expected to help prosecute a white man
for assault, murder, or any other crime. That was the conclusion reached
by a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in Grenada, Mississippi. "As against freed¬
men the majority of whites are a unit and even honorable men, otherwise,
will vouch for persons of, to say the least, doubtful character as 'high social
Gentlemen.’ ” 136

If a white man should be apprehended and tried for offenses committed
against freedmen, the chances of convicting him were slight so long as
whites dominated the juries. And if convicted, the penalties assessed
against him were likely to be far less than the gravity of the crime war¬
ranted or that would have been imposed upon a black person. The double
standard of white justice was nowhere clearer, in fact, than in the disparate

286

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

punishments meted out to whites and blacks convicted of similar crimes.
In Marion County, Florida, for example, James J. Denton, after being
convicted of the slaying of a black man, had to pay a fine of $250 and serve
one minute in prison; most blacks found guilty of petty theft could expect
a more severe sentence. (In nearby Lake City, two blacks convicted of
stealing several boxes of goods from a railroad company were fined $500;
unable to pay the fine, their services were sold to the highest bidder.) No
doubt many whites still needed to learn that killing a black person
amounted to murder. But a Freedmen’s Bureau oflicer in Georgia de¬
spaired of any early or mass conversion to that principle. "The best men
in the State admit that no jury would convict a white man for killing a
freedman, or fail to hang a negro who had killed a white man in self-
defence.” The need to demonstrate to the satisfaction of a white jury that
the defendant had been "animated by the intention to kill” complicated the
conviction and punishment of any white person for murder, as did the
underlying principle of slave law that a master’s severe chastisement of his
blacks did not justify resistance. As the Georgia Supreme Court had once
ruled, even if the owner should "exceed the bounds of reason ... in his
chastisement, the slave must submit... unless the attack... be calculated
to produce death.” 137

Rather than press for a diminution or increase in the penalties as¬
sessed by the courts, blacks simply insisted that the punishment fit the
crime and be applied equally to both races. In New Orleans, the local
criminal court sentenced a white person convicted of theft (a pair of shoes
valued at $13) to one day in prison; the same court on the same day
committed a black person found guilty of theft (shirts and petticoats valued
at $18) to three months in prison—or, as the local black newspaper noted,
"three days for the stealing, and eighty-seven days for being colored.” The
disparity in punishments, however, was not confined to the regular courts;
in many regions, the provost marshals adopted the same double standard.’
In Salisbury, North Carolina, a white woman killed a black mother who
had tried to rescue her child from a severe beating; a military court found
her guilty of manslaughter and fined her $1,000, and within several days
the white community had collected and paid the fine. In Natchez, a white
man who brutally assaulted an elderly black woman was fined $15 ($5 for
the provost marshal who sentenced him and $10 for the injured woman);
the victim contributed her award to the Lincoln Monument Fund, exclaim-
big, "I don’t want money, but justice.” 188

. When blacks drew up their postwar demands, equal justice almost
invariably superseded all others. Even those who argued the primacy of the
suffrage or economic grievances conceded that without equal protection
under the law, neither the property they accumulated, the wages they were
promised, nor the vote they might someday cast would be safe. "To be sure,
sah, we wants to vote,” a black barber observed, "but, sah, de great matter
is to git into de witness-box.” The price exacted of the white South in
exchange for the reinstatement of civil courts was the admissibility of

How Free Is Free?

287

black testimony. Like emancipation and later the suffrage, whites viewed
it as a consequence of military defeat and occupation. But that hardly made
it a popular concept. "Nothing would make me cut a nigger’s throat from
ear to ear so quick,” said a white shoemaker in Liberty, Virginia, "as
having him set up his impudent face to tell that a thing wasn’t so when I
said it was so.” 139

With the right of testimony, blacks had hoped to secure the equal
protection which the Constitution ensured all citizens. The credibility ac¬
corded such testimony by white judges and juries, however, made this
substantially less than the triumph fireedmen had imagined. "Why, no
nigger can be believed whether he is under oath or not,” a Virginian
observed. "No one that knows a nigger will ever think of believing him if
it’s for his interest to lie.” Making essentially the same point, a resident
of Charlotte, North Carolina, perhaps said more than he intended when he
argued that white people were simply not ready to admit black testimony
against other whites. "What would be the good of putting niggers in the
witness-box?” he asked. "You must have niggers in the jury-box, too, or
nigger evidence will not be believed. I don’t think you could find twelve
men in the whole State who would attach any weight to the testimony of
ninety-nine niggers in a hundred.” 140

Few blacks might have disagreed with that assessment of the minimal
impact of their testimony. Unless they were admitted to the juries, too,
they realized, equal justice would remain a mockery. "It is the right of
every man accused of any offence, to be tried by a jury of his peers,” the
Reverend J. W. Hood told a black convention in North Carolina. "I claim
that the black man is my peer, and so I am not tried by my peers unless
there be one or more black men in the jury box.” By the eve of Radical
Reconstruction, blacks were already sitting on some juries, though not
without vehement white objections, and still more would be added after the
Radical governments took power. In some states, as in South Carolina,
Federal authorities stipulated that every person registered as a taxpayer
or voter also qualified as a juror. Like the admission ofblack testimony, the
appearance of blacks in the jury box signaled still another encroachment
on the white man’s domain. To a Louisiana planter and judge, it all seemed
like a steady descent into total anarchy and depravity, and he could trace
every step along the way. "The fortune of war has materially changed my
circumstances. My niggers used to do as I told them, but that time is passed.
Your Northern people have made soldiers of our servants, and will, I
presume, make voters of them. In five years, if I continue the practice of
law, I suppose I shall be addressing a dozen negroes as gentlemen of the
jury.” 141

If black jurors and testimony could soften the abuses of the courts,
many blacks also contended that only biracial police forces could ensure a
semblance of equality in law enforcement. Until that objective had been
realized, at least, freedmen would remain vulnerable to harassment, vio¬
lence, and discriminatory arrests by police officers who acted as the instru-

288

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

ments of white control and repression. "The police of this place mal»> the
law to suit themselves,” a black teacher in Wetumpka, Alabama, protested,
citing arrests of freedmen for minor offenses which were ignored when
committed by whites. "From what I can see and hear among the Col[ore]d
people of this place,” he added, "something serious will grow out of this if
we do not get the proper protection.” In some communities, blacks com¬
plained that policemen regularly invaded their homes, ostensibly in search
of weapons and to quiet the insurrectionary fears of white citizens. The
black newspaper in New Orleans charged the police with "a provoking
series of petty persecutions” as well as participation in the riot of1866 and
expressed particular outrage over the disarming of blacks while whites
openly displayed their weapons without fear of arrest. The black protests,
from wherever they emanated, agreed that law and order could not be
established in their communities without some restraints being placed on
the police. A resident of Charleston commended the mili tary commander
there for having found one constructive solution to the problem of police
violence—he ordered the arrest of any policeman found in possession of a
revolver or club. 142

Despite black testimony and some black jurors, the quality of justice
on the eve of Radical Reconstruction largely reflected white power and the
determination to preserve it. If anyone thought the freedmen were enjoy-
ing equal protection under the law, a black resident of Macon, Georgia,
invited him to visit the local courtroom and observe the proceedings. "A
white man may assault a colored gentleman at high noon, pelt him with
stones, or maul him with a club, without any provocation at all; and if it
has to be decided by rebel justice, the colored man is fined or imprisoned,
and the white man is justified in what he and his friends call a 'narrow
escape.’ ” To many blacks, that remained the crux of their problem—the
black plaintiff appeared to have less of a chance for legal redress than the
defendant. If he hesitated to file a complaint against a white person or to
involve himself in any way with the legal process, that was because he
feared ending up in jail rather than the offender. When the victims of white
violence demanded that action be taken against white assailants, some of
them were dismissed with the advice to avoid contact with individuals who
were apt. to harm them. 143 That was surely one way to avoid trouble,
though difficult to achieve without becoming a recluse; some blacks sug¬
gested another alternative, far more in keeping with the values and tradi¬
tion of white America—-they could shoot the assailant in self-defense.

After still another violent clash in Norfolk, in which Yankee troops
had vowed to "clear out all the niggers,” a black resident of that city voiced
his despair at such betrayal and at the same time warned all whites—

How Free Is Free?

289

Yankees and natives alike—not to push the freedmen too far. "We are a
nation that loves the white people,” he declared, "and we would never
attack them, but if we are driven to exasperation we know our duty.”
Although emancipation and the gradual reduction of Union troops made
blacks more vulnerable to attack, most of them had enjoyed freedom, how¬
ever briefly, and refused to surrender their newly acquired rights without
a struggle. It seemed like an appropriate time, then, to invoke such time-
honored concepts and virtues as self-defense.

A kind of general serfdom and humiliation of the colored race is about
to take the place of slavery—if we do not check the tendency toward that
course.... If there is no protection for us at the hands of the municipal
police or the military guard, if there is no redress for our people before
the Criminal Courts in cases of murder and rape, then let us form at once
societies for self-protection and have recourse to personal defense.

That sentiment, voiced by the black newspaper in New Orleans, accorded
with advice to discharged black soldiers to retain their guns and its call for
Home Guard units which would mobilize whenever circumstances de¬
manded their presence. After all, why should not those who had defended
their nation on the battlefields likewise defend their families and friends
at home. "In times of peace prepare for war,” a black resident of New
Orleans suggested. "They have burned our churches, murdered our friends
in their own yards, in the presence of their own family, and yet our civil
government is still running, and the murderers are still allowed to roam
our streets undisturbed.” 144

Not surprisingly, blacks vented much of their anger and "lawlessness”
on the law itself. Since they could not expect impartial justice in the
courtroom, groups of blacks in some communities invaded the jails and
courtrooms to release their accused brethren. At the same time, they
evinced a determination to mete out extralegal justice if the white police
and courts failed to do their duty. In Selma, Alabama, blacks threatened
to burn down the town unless a known white murderer was turned over
to them or brought to justice; Federal troops intervened and the suspected
murderer escaped. After a white mob in JefFersonton, Georgia, removed a
black youth from the jail and hanged him, allegedly for having killed a
farm animal, more than a hundred blacks, all of them armed with guns and
pistols, appeared to demand the prosecution of those responsible for the
lynching. Although Federal authorities persuaded the blacks to disperse,
a still larger crowd gathered the next day, and this time the local Freed-
men’s Bureau agent requested Federal troops. Only the presence of such
troops prevented a riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, after blacks tried
to halt the public whipping of five men found guilty in a trial where black
testimony had been excluded; in three Virginia counties, the Freedmen’s
Bureau quickly resumed judicial power because the blacks had threatened
to retaliate for the injustices committed by the civil courts; and in several

290

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

communities, blacks armed themselves to resist attacks on their schools
and churches. 145

The threats of black retaliatory violence obviously concerned native
whites and military authorities and gave rise in the postwar years to new
rumors and reports of insurrectionary activity. But little was done to at¬
tack the sources of black discontent. In Columbia, South Carolina blacks
reacted with outrage when in May 1866 the chief of police shot and killed
a young freedman while arresting him for a misdemeanor. Both the coro¬
ner’s jury and local military authorities acquitted the police chief, setting
off a new wave of anger in the black community. On the morning of May
30, a Union officer was "startled” to find that a notice had been posted
during the night in the local post office.

We the Coloured Men of Columbia, were Advised to whate [wait] and see
what would be said or done a bout that act of Murder committed by Green.

We have Seen and heard! We know it to be a mock trial and we will trie
him next. He has committed Cold and Willful Murder and if not removed,
we can and will have revenge.... By one thousand true and reddy We
will have his Blood, Green the Murderer.

Two companies of Federal troops were brought into the city, the police chief
secluded himself, and the black threats of violence failed to materialize.
But the worst feature in the case,” a black woman wrote the Freedmen’s
Bureau, was that nothing had been done to satisfy the grievances of the
black residents, thereby encouraging the whites to think themselves im¬
mune to prosecution or control.

We have very dark days here; the colored people are almost in despair
The rebels here boast that the negroes shall not have as much liberty
now, as they enjoyed during slavery. We can not have a party or gather-
mg of any kind, unless we ask leave of the Mayor, & the men that the
United States send here to keep things straight, wink at, & allow these
things to go on thus.

God knows how we will do. We are not allowed to have arms- if a
white man strikes us, & we attempt to defend ourselves, we are carried
to Provost Court, & fined ten or twenty dollars. It is hard I tell you. Our
tnends in Congress are wasting time & breath, & all the bills they may

pass, wul do us no good, unless men are sent here, that will see those laws
enforced.

Col. Greene [the Union commander] cares not a fig for a colored
person. It is very seldom you can get a word with him. He spends all his
time in the Billiard Saloon....

I will tell you, if things go on thus, our doom is sealed. God knows
rt is worse than slavery. The negro code is in full force here with both
Yankees and rebels . 146

T ^ aphiC . de f ripti0n of conditions “ the capital of South Carolina
mia-1866 might have been duplicated in countless communities and

How Free Is Free?

291

regions. Neither her assessment nor her despair were unique. Although the
talk of armed retaliation might evoke images of black "minutemen” and
"regulators, 1 ” the freedmen possessed neither the weapons nor the power
to offset the better organized whites. Nor could they successfully contend
with the threat of Federal intervention to suppress them if they took the
law into their own hands. Despite the rhetoric of violence, the great mass
of blacks recognized where the power still resided.

If confronted with an intolerable situation on the plantation or in the
neighborhood, alternatives other than armed resistance were presumably
available to black people. Freedom permitted them to take their labor
elsewhere. For many freed slaves, in fact, this right constituted the very
essence of their new status, and they proposed to use such a weapon to
carve out a greater degree of independence for themselves and their fami¬
lies. Not all freedmen exercised this prerogative in the same way, or at the
same time, and some did not exercise it at all. Neither the former slave nor
his former master, however, could easily predict the precise moment when
confrontation and separation would become unavoidable.

Chapter Six

THE FEEL OF FREEDOM:
MOVING ABOUT

So long ez de shadder ob de gret house falls acrostyou, you ain’t gwine
ter feel lak no free man, an’you ain’t gwine ter feel lak no free ’oman.

You mus’ all move—you mus’ move clar away from de ole places what
you knows, ter de new places what you don’t know, whey you kin raise
up yore head douten no fear o’Marse Dis ur Marse Tudder.

—RICHARD EDWARDS,

BLACK PREACHER, FLORIDA, 1865 1

Sun, you be here an* I’ll be gone.

Bye, bye, don’t grieve arter me,

Won’t give you my place, not fo*your’n,

Bye, bye, don’t grieve arter me,

’Cause you be here an’ I’ll be gone.

—FREEDMEN SONG,

VIRGINIA, CIRCA 1865 2

I o throw off a lifetime of restraint and dependency and to feel like
. free men or free women, newly liberated slaves adopted different
priorities and chose various ways in which to express themselves, ranging
from dramatic breaks with the past to subtle and barely perceptible
changes in demeanor and behavior. But even as they secured family ties
sanctified marriage relations, proclaimed surnames, and encroached on
the white man s racial etiquette, black men and women grappled with the
most critical questions affecting their lives and status. To make certain of
their freedom would they first need to separate themselves physically from
those who had only recently owned them? If so, where would they go, how
would they protect themselves from hostile whites, for whom and under
what conditions would they work? If they remained on the old place, what
relations would they now enjoy with their former owners and how could
they safely manifest their freedom?

Having lived in close, sometimes intimate contact with their "white

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

293

folks,” dependent on them for daily sustenance, conditioned by their de¬
mands and expectations, freedmen could not always quickly or easily
resolve such questions. For many of them, however, that tension between
the urge toward personal autonomy and the compulsions of the old depen¬
dency grew increasingly intolerable, and nearly every slaveholding family
could affix a date to the moment when their former slaves resolved the
tension. "On the 5th of August [1865] one of our young men left for Al¬
bany,” the Reverend John Jones reported, "and on the 8th inst. (or night
before) nine more took up the line of march, carrying our house boy Allen
and a girl sixteen years old (Amelia, the spinner). This girl had been
corrected for being out the most of Saturday night previously.” Once that
"dark, dissolving, disquieting wave of emancipation” (as he called it) broke
over a particular region or plantation, many a planter family watched
helplessly as the only world they had known collapsed around them. "I
have been marking its approach for months,” the Georgia clergyman
wrote, "and watching its influence on our own people. It has been like the
iceberg, withering and deadening the best sensibilities of master and ser¬
vant, and fast sundering the domestic ties of years.” 3

To experience the phenomenon was traumatic enough, but to seek to
understand it could be a totally frustrating and impossible task. Ella Ger¬
trude Thomas, the wife of a Georgia planter, tried her best, while viewing
from day to day, and then confiding to her diary, the rupture of those
affective ties which had provided her with such fond memories of a past
now apparently beyond recovery. The experience of Jefferson and Gertrude
Thomas reveals only the disruption of one household. But their ordeal, as
they came to realize, was not unique. Like so many former slaveholders,
the Thomases suffered the ingratitude of favorites, the impertinence of
strangers, the exasperation of new "help,” and the fears of race war. And
like many others, Gertrude Thomas reached that point when nothing sur¬
prised her any longer and she could only utter the familiar cry of post¬
emancipation despair—"And has it come to this?” Most importantly, the
legacy of distrust, bitterness, and recrimination emerging out of experi¬
ences like these helped to shape race relations in the South for the next
several decades.

Except for those who had already experienced the anguish of wartime
"betrayal,” few knew what to expect from their black servants and laborers
in the first months of emancipation. "Excitement rules the hour,” Gertrude
Thomas observed in May 1865. "No one appears to have a settled plan of
action, the Negroes crowd the streets and loaf around the pumps and
corners of the street.... I see no evidence of disrespect on the part of the
Negroes who are here from the adjoining plantations.” During the war,
nearly all the Thomas slaves, both at the Augusta house and plantation
(some six miles outside of town) and on the plantation in Burke County, had
"proved most faithful.” Only when Union troops entered Augusta, more
than three weeks after the end of the war, did Gertrude Thomas resign
herself to the inevitability of emancipation. While Yankee soldiers and
blacks filled the streets, Jefferson Thomas performed the familiar rites of

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emancipation, advising the house staff that he would just "as soon pay
them wages as any one else.” The servants received the news with little
show of emotion, though they evinced "a more cheerful spirit than ever”
and Sarah "was really lively while she was sewing on Franks pants.” Still,
their apparent "faithfulness” pleased the Thomases, even as the future
seemed dim. "Our Negroes will be put on lands confiscated and imagination
cannot tell what is in store for us.”

The news of freedom precipitated no spontaneous celebration or Ju¬
bilee among the Thomas blacks. None of them suddenly rushed out to test
their new status. When they severed their ties with the Thomases, they did
so quietly with a conspicuous absence of fanfare. There was no insubordina¬
tion, there were no bursts of insolence, and the Thomas property remained
undisturbed. Nor were there any tearful farewells. Like many freed slaves
elsewhere, the Thomas servants did not betray their emotions, at least not
in the presence of their former owners. Within less than a month after the
Union occupation, nearly all of them left in much the same manner as they
had received the news that they were free.

Among the most faithful and best liked of the slaves had been Daniel,
the first servant Jefferson Thomas had ever owned. "When we were mar¬
ried,” Gertrude Thomas recalled, "his Father gave him to us to go in the
Buggy.” Daniel was the first servant to depart, and he did so at night
"without saying anything to anyone.” He remained in town but the Thom¬
ases had no wish to see him again. "If he returns to the yard he shall not
enter it.” The day after Daniel’s unexpected departure, Betsy went out to
pick up the newspaper, "as she was in the habit of doing every day.” This
time, she never returned. "I suppose that she had been met by her Father
in the street and taken away but then I learned that she had taken her
clothes out of the Ironing room under the pretense of washing them.”
Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Thomas learned that the "disappearance” had
been "a concerted plan” between Betsy and her mother, who had once been
a servant in the house ("an excellent washer and ironer”) but was found
to be "dishonest” and had been transferred to the plantation in Burke
County. "She left the Plantation, came up and took Betsy home with her.”
While disclaiming "any emotion of interest” in Betsy’s departure, this loss
obviously troubled Mrs. Thomas. Nor did the thought that familial ties had
superseded those of mistress and slave console her in any way. "I felt
interest in Betsy, she was a bright quick child and raised in our family
would have become a good servant. As it is she will be under her Mothers
influence and run wild in the street.”

If the Thomases wondered who might leave them next, they did not
have long to wait. But this time, at least, they had a premonition. Several
days after Betsy’s disappearance, Aunt Sarah seemed more diligent and
cheerful than usual. "Sarah has something on her mind,” Gertrude
Thomas remarked to her husband. "She has either decided to go or the
prospect of being paid if she remains has put her in a very good humor.”
That night, she left. By now, the Thomases were making a conscious effort

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

295

to conceal their disappointment from the remaining servants, apparently
in the belief that the others derived some pleasure from their discomfort.
Meanwhile, Nancy had become a problem. After the departure of Sarah,
she had been instructed to take over the cooking as well as perform her
usual duties. Perhaps dismayed by her doubled work load, Nancy claimed
that she was not well enough to work. When the "illness” persisted and the
unwashed clothes accumulated in the ironing room, the much-annoyed
mistress decided to take action. "Nancy,” she asked, "do you expect I can
afford to pay you wages in your situation, support your two children and
then have you sick as much as you are?” Nancy stood there and made no
reply. The next day, she left with her two children, claiming that she would
return shortly. That was the last Mrs. Thomas saw of her, and upon enter¬
ing Nancy’s room she discovered not unexpectedly that "all her things had
been removed.” Less than a week later, Willy departed, thereby spurning
the Thomases’ offer of clothing and a silver quarter every Saturday night.
The next day. Manly left with his two children, apparently without any
explanation.

"Out of all our old house servants,” Gertrude Thomas noted near the
end of May 1865, "not one remains except Patsy and a little boy Frank.”
Gradually and unspectacularly, nearly all of the servants had grasped
their freedom by completely severing the old ties. The Thomases could only
console themselves with the knowledge that many other white families
were experiencing similar losses. For Gertrude Thomas, in fact, the depar¬
ture of Susan from her mother’s household truly marked the end of an era.
"I am under too many obligations to Susan to have hard feelings towards
her. During six confinements Susan has been with me, the best of servants,
rendering the most efficient help. To Ma she has always been invaluable
and in cases of sickness there was no one like Susan. Her husband Anthony
was one of the first to leave the Cuming Plantation and incited others to
do the same. I expect he influenced Susan.” Now that Susan had left,
Gertrude Thomas recalled the number of times her father had warned the
family about this slave. "I have often heard Pa say that in case of a revolt
among Negroes he thought that Susan would serve as ringleader. She was
the first servant to leave Ma’s yard and left without one word.”

By late July 1865, Gertrude Thomas hoped that "the worst of this
transition state of the Negroes” had been reached. "If not,” she sighed,
"God have mercy upon us.” But her conversations with friends and rela¬
tives, as well as the news from the plantation in Burke County, were
anything but reassuring; indeed, one close friend speculated that "things
would go on so until Christmas” and then she expected real trouble, under¬
scoring her warning with a gesture across the throat. As if to confirm such
fears, a delegation of field hands from the plantation came to the Augusta
house, entered the yard, and handed Jefferson Thomas a summons from
the local Union Army commander, ordering him to appear and answer the
demand of these blacks for wages. Incensed by the impertinence of the
delegation, Thomas ordered them out of his yard. Before leaving, however,

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

one of them shouted out an insult, hoping—or so the Thomases thought—
to provoke him into a confrontation. "And this too we had to endure,” Mrs.
Thomas wrote of the incident. "As it could not be resented it was treated
with the silence of contempt. And has it come to this?” After reflecting over
her experience of the past several months, Gertrude Thomas, who had once
confessed her ambivalence about slavery, decided that she would just as
soon never have to look at a black man or woman again. "Every thing is
entirely reversed, I feel no interest in them whatever and hope I never
will.” 4

While every experience had its own unique qualities, the odyssey of
Jefferson and Gertrude Thomas through the first months of emancipation
revealed a pattern of behavior—white and black—that would be repeated
on farms and plantations and in town houses throughout the South. Once
emancipation had been acknowledged, what mattered was how many freed
slaves would find separation indispensable to their new status. With the
wartime experience still vivid in many minds, few whites now thought they
knew their former slaves well enough to speculate with much confidence
on this troublesome question. "Some folks think free labour will be cheap
& that the freedmen will gladly hire out for food and clothing,” a South
Carolinian wrote. "But I think not, they seem so eager to throw off the yoke
of bondage they will suffer somewhat, before they will return to the planta¬
tions. ... It seems like a dream, dear Aunt, we are living in such times.” 5

The flames from a pitch-pine bonfire illuminated the woods near the
Lester plantation in northern Florida. Hundreds of men, women, and chil¬
dren came from every direction to attend this late-night meeting, gathering
around a makeshift speaker’s platform—the trunk of a fallen pine tree.
Mounting that rostrum, Richard Edwards, a black preacher, looked out at
the faces of these people only recently freed from bondage. With their cries
of "Dat’s so” and loud "Amens” punctuating his remarks, he told them of
the glories of their triumph. He welcomed the new era in which black men
and women no longer cringed in the presence of the white man. He urged
them to embrace their liberty. He insisted that only they—not the Yan¬
kees, not Lincoln, not the northern teachers—could make themselves free.

You ain’t, none o’ you, gwinter feel rale free till you shakes de dus’ ob
de Ole Plantashun offen yore feet an’ goes ter a new place whey you kin
live out o’ sight o’ de gret house. So long ez de shadder ob de gret house
falls acrost you, you ain’t gwine ter feel lak no free man, an’ you ain’t
gwine ter feel lak no free ’oman. You mus’ all move—you mus’ move clar
away from de ole places what you knows, ter de new places what you
don’t know, whey you kin raise up yore head douten no fear o’ Marse Dis

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

297

ur Marse Tudder. Take yore freedum, my brudders an’ my sisters. You-all
is jis’ ez good ez ennybody, an’ you-all is jis’ ez free! Go whey you please
—do what you please—furgit erbout de white folks—an* now stan’ up on
yore feet—lif up yore eyes—an’ shout wid me Glory, halleluyer! AMEN ! 6

Within the first year of freedom, thousands of blacks exercised that
option in precisely that spirit. If they were truly free, they could walk off
the plantation on which they had labored as slaves and never return.
Whatever else they did, that remained the surest, the quickest way to
demonstrate to themselves that their old masters and mistresses no longer
owned or controlled them, that they were now free to make their own
decisions. Although the black preacher in Florida had talked about "new
places what you don’t know,” most of those who left preferred the localities
they knew, where they could still retain their familial ties and friendships;
they might simply move to the next plantation or to the nearest town. In
separating themselves from their previous owners, not from the region
itself, they had begun to feel like free men and women.

Explaining the movement ofblacks in his region, a Florida planter and
physician made the essential point. "The negroes don’t seem to feel free
unless they leave their old homes,” he informed his cousin in North
Carolina, "just to make it sure they can go when and where they choose.”
Elsewhere in the South, white families and Federal officials observed the
same phenomenon: many freedmen were acting on the assumption that to
stay with their former masters was to remain slaves. Once a black man or
woman made the critical decision to leave, not even the most handsome of
offers from the former master was likely to keep them on the old place. In
South Carolina, a white family proposed to pay their valuable cook nearly
twice the amount she had been offered in the nearby village. But this
woman, who had served the family faithfully for many years, could not be
persuaded to stay. "No, Miss, I must go,” she insisted. When pressed to give
some reason for spurning such a generous offer, the woman had little
difficulty in making her motives absolutely clear: "If I stay here I’ll never
know I am free.” Without even pretending to understand the deeply felt
yearnings that prompted such behavior, some whites chose to dismiss the
departures as foolish or even amusing, much as they previously had belit¬
tled the humanity of their slaves. "In almost every yard servants are
leaving,” Emma Holmes observed in Camden, South Carolina, "but going
to wait on other people for food merely, sometimes with the promise of
clothing, passing themselves off as free, much to our amusement.” 7

To leave the plantation or farm, his worldly possessions stuffed into a
small bundle slung over his shoulder, came easily to some, not so easily to
most. On numerous places, the entire black population decamped at the
same time, as if prearranged, leaving the owners to wallow in self-pity and
to utter those familiar cries of betrayal. "Every Negro has left us,” the wife
of a South Carolina planter exclaimed in July 1865. "I have never in my
life met with such ingratitude, every Negro deserted.” 8 But the postwar

298

BEEN IN

THE STORM SO LONG

"exodus” usually reflected individual and family decisions and often
sharply divided the ex-slaves on the same plantation. Typically, as a former
Mississippi slave recalled, "they didn’t go off*right at first. They was several
years getting broke up. Some went, some stayed, some actually moved back.
Like bees trying to find a setting place.” 9 For white families to make sense
out of those who left and those who stayed proved no less frustrating after
emancipation than during the Yankee invasion. Again, previous records of
behavior were misleading, verbal expressions of loyalty counted for little,
and familial ties could induce various responses. No archetypal "deserter”
emerged: the faithful and the troublesome left, the most and the least
trusted, those who had endured a harsh bondage and those who counted
themselves among the relatively well treated.

The "exodus” affected every kind of master. Those who had acquired
notorious reputations, however, usually sustained the earliest and the larg¬
est losses. Austin Grant, who had worked as a field hand in Mississippi and
Texas, recalled that his master had been "a pretty good boss” because he
had fed them well. But he had also made frequent use of the "black snake”
(a bullwhip) to maintain discipline and production, and he worked them
hard.

We got up early, you betcha. You would be out there by time you could
see and you quit when it was dark. They tasked us. They would give us
200 or 300 pounds of cotton to bring in and you would git it, and if you
didn’ git it, you better, or you would git it tomorrow, or your back would
git it. Or you’d git it from someone else, maybe steal it from their sacks.

When the master informed them of their freedom, he made himself quite
clear: "Now, you can jes’ work on if you want to, and Ill treat you jes’ like
I always did.” That was all they needed to hear. "I guess when he said that
they knew what he meant. The’ wasn’t but one family left with ’im. They
stayed about two years. But the rest was just like birds, they jes’ flew.” On
an Alabama plantation, Aunt Nellie, a "nurse girl” who had alternated
between tending a temperamental mistress and her equally obnoxious
children, left as soon as she learned of her freedom but not before giving
the children a long-overdue thrashing. 10

Whatever the pathos and nostalgia conveyed by the popular minstrel
ballad "I Lost My Massa When Dey Set Me Free,” newly freed slaves, as
the ballad itself suggested, might have felt and acknowledged a certain
affection for their "white folks” but still left them. "It ain’t that I didn’t
love my Marster,” Melvin Smith recalled, "but I jest likes to be free,” and
when told that he "didn’t b’long to nobody no more” he immediately left
his home plantation in South Carolina and headed for Tallahassee, Florida.
Reputedly humane and generous masters who had expected to retain their
former slaves were thus in numerous instances doomed to a bitter disap¬
pointment. "As a general rule,” a white woman in Virginia wrote of the
"defections” in her region, "they are all anxious to leave home and many

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

299

that seemed perfectly contented in slavery are now dissatisfied, and
many humane kind masters, who owned large numbers of servants, have
been left without a single one.” Having always thought of himself as a good
master, a planter in Amelia County, Virginia, tried to understand why he
had lost all but six of his 115 slaves. "My people were always well treated,
and never were worked hard. A number of them had been with my father,
and there were a good many that I had grown up with from boyhood. I loved
some of them.” Although many of his slaves seemed to share this affection,
they were no less adamant in their decision to leave, even as they came to
him with tears in their eyes to shake his hand and bid him farewell. 11

The good reputation of a former slaveholder was not necessarily irrele¬
vant when blacks formulated their post-emancipation plans. It simply was
not always enough. The decisions made by black people were not always
in reaction to the abuse, kindness, or indifference of white men; their
behavior in the aftermath of freedom reflected a diversity of consider¬
ations, not the least of which were familial ties, attachment to particular
locales, and the perfectly natural urge to explore the forbidden and the
unknown and to grasp new and hopefully more remunerative opportuni¬
ties. Again, Mary Chesnut seemed more perceptive than most whites when
she observed in June 1865, "In their furious, emotional way they swore
devotion to us to their dying day. All the same, the moment they see an
opening to better themselves, they will move on.” Moreover, as the freed
blacks perceived the situation, the previous good works and present good
intentions of a former master counted for less than their confidence in his
ability and willingness to compensate them properly for any future labor.
If freed slaves suspected that their old master might be on the verge of
bankruptcy (and the blacks usually surmised correctly), they saw little
reason to stay with him. Sarah Ann Smith, for example, acknowledged that
her master had been a decent man but he was simply "too busted ter hire
us ter stay on, so we moved over ter Mr. Womble's place.” Despite the "good
white folkses” Anna Parkes had served, she realized that most of the
master's money "wuz gone,” he could obviously not afford to pay most of
his laborers, and she and her mother therefore moved to the nearby gun
factory and began to take in washing. 12

Even if their former masters were able and willing to pay them, they
might choose not to stay if they had any reason, based on their previous
experience, to doubt his word. Significant numbers of ex-slaveholders failed
to pass that test. After all, a freedman from Petersburg, Virginia, ex¬
plained, so many masters had broken so many promises in the past that
they had forfeited the confidence of their blacks, and those who had been
victimized in this way "won't stay with their old masters on any terms.”
On a plantation in Crawford County, Georgia, the freedmen were promised
a plot of land and a mule by their former owner. But they knew from
experience that the mistress was "de real boss” and they suspected she
would not agree to such a generous offer. And when those suspicions were

300

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

confirmed, Tines Kendricks recalled, "every nigger on dat place left. Dey
sure done dat; an’ old mars an’ old mis’, dey never had a hand left there
on that great big place, an’ all that ground layin’ out.” 13

With emancipation, many blacks redefined the mutual obligations
which had been implicit in the slave-master relationship. They were now
apt to demand not only the protection and care to which they had been
accustomed but a compensation, respect, and autonomy that would be
commensurate with their new status. If they thought their former master
incapable of such concessions, or if he violated their expectations (as on the
first payday), that was sufficient reason to sever the old ties. Even if the
master proved agreeable, some blacks found it impossible to give full ex¬
pression to their freedom in the presence of people who had only recently
demanded their absolute obedience and subserviency. All too often, as the
freedmen quickly discovered, their previous owners, no matter how well-
intentioned, were willing to do everything for them except accord them the
same dignity and respect they demanded for themselves. Trying to make
some sense out of his recent losses, a South Carolina planter explained to
a northern visitor how he had made such a good home for his slaves and
how he had cared for them in health and sickness. With a note of pride in
his voice, he declared that he had been so solicitous of his slaves that they
had never been obliged to think for themselves. And yet, "these niggers all
left me,” and they did so at the first opportunity. 14

Rather than accept their losses as an inevitable consequence of eman¬
cipation, many planter families viewed them as betrayal of a mutual trust.
Provoked by such charges, the black newspaper in New Orleans asked the
white South what it might have expected from a people who had spent a
lifetime in bondage. If the freed slaves had remained passive, that would
only have confirmed their inferiority as a race, incapable of appreciating
the value of freedom. But in choosing to exercise that freedom and the
rights belonging to free Americans, they stood convicted of moral treason
and ingratitude.

Four or five years ago, there was nothing but praise coming forth
from the lips of the Southern people when alluding to the colored popula¬
tion. The negro was a good-natured being; he was a faithful and devoted
servant; he would sacrifice his life, if necessary, to save his masters,...
and on many a battle-field, it was recorded that some negro boy had
gallantly fought in the ranks of the Confederates, by the side of his
owner; and so forth.

The Northern soldier came down to the cotton and sugar plantations,
and made the black man free. And, lo! for the great crime of accepting
the boon of freedom, the negro can expect nothing but hatred, insults and
contumeliousness at the hands of his former well-wishers. Would the
Southerner esteem the black man more, if the latter had esteemed his
freedom less? if he was less of a man? if he cared not for his human
dignity? if he had less self-respect? if he was ready to sacrifice his
rights? 15

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

301

Even if the former slaveholders would have regarded these as valid ques¬
tions, which is doubtful, they were in no emotional state to venture any
answers.

Since the end of the war, nothing had seemed quite the same to the old
slaveholding families. Even if they pretended to understand the fragile
nature of the old ties, that could not make the losses any more bearable.
"Something dreadful has happened dear Diary,” confided a Florida woman
in May 1865.

I hardly know how to tell it, my dear black mammy has left us.... I feel
lost, I feel as if someone is dead in the house. Whatever will I do without
my Mammy? When she was going she stopped on the doorstep and,
shaking her fist at Mother [with whom she had had an altercation], she
said: "Ill miss you—the Lord knows I’ll miss you—but youll miss me, too
—you see if you don’t.”

With equal consternation, a young Virginia woman returned home from
school to find "everything strange” in the household; the cook, who had
"reigned” in the kitchen for some thirty years, had gone to Richmond, as
had most of the servants. "I cannot tell you how it oppressed me to miss
the familiar black faces I have loved all my life, and to feel that our negroes
cared so little for us, and left at the first invitation.” 16

Although many families had anticipated losses, they may have under¬
estimated how they would feel when the blacks actually confirmed their
fears. Despite the wartime lessons, which should have forced some
humility upon the slaveholding class, they still had enormous self-pride
invested in the postwar behavior of the freed slaves, along with an image
of themselves that they expected their blacks to authenticate. But the first
waves of postwar departures failed to sustain that image in numerous
instances, and the cries of ingratitude and betrayal were repeated with
even greater vigor and frequency than during the war, compounded this
time by a growing feeling of helplessness. "Just imagine,” a Virginia
woman wrote of herself and her husband, "two forlorn beings as we are,
neither of us able to help ourselves, left without a soul to do anything for
us.” The same themes of despair and disbelief thus persisted. That those
for whom they had done the most should have demonstrated the greatest
degree of ingratitude still perplexed them. Even more inexplicable, many
of the servants who had stood by their white families in the worst period
of the war, who had given them comfort and support when it was badly
needed, were now abandoning them. No sooner had the war ended than the
servant of Emma LeConte who had foraged for food to nourish the child

302

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

entrusted to her care became "a great nuisance” and then departed "unex¬
pectedly.” 17

It was all like a horrible dream, Grace Elmore lamented, "this break¬
ing up of old ties, the giving up of those with whom your life has been spent,
and making a new and wholly unknown start.” Even if the bulk of the work
force remained with them, the departure of certain individuals gave former
masters and mistresses little reason to place much confidence in the others.
In the Elmore household in South Carolina, the fidelity of most of the
servants seemed almost forgotten amidst the distress over the departure
of "Old Mary,” the reliable nurse "of whom we expected most because of
her age and the baby.”

Saturday evening she was told of her freedom & expressed quiet satisfac¬
tion, but said none could be happy without prayer (the hypocrite) and
Monday by daylight she took herself off, leaving the poor baby without
a nurse. I feel so provoked, of course one cannot expect total sacrifice of
self, but certainly there should be some consideration of others. Old Mary
is off my books for any kindness or consideration I may be able to show
her in after years. I would not turn on my heel to help her, a more
pampered indulged old woman one could find no where.... I think a
marked difference should be shown between those who act in a thought¬
ful and affectionate manner, and those who show no thought or care for
you.

With her servants gradually leaving, Mary Jones reached essentially the
same conclusion in her Georgia home; in fact, she thought it a triumph
of sorts that she had managed to overcome any "anxieties” she might
have once felt for this race of people. "My life long (I mean since I had a
home) I have been laboring and caring for them, and since the war have
labored with all my might to supply their wants, and expended every¬
thing I had upon their support, directly or indirectly; and this is their
return.” 18

Whether provoked by the departures or by the behavior of the blacks
who remained, white families looked on with emotions that varied from
outrage to resignation to sorrow, and many ran the entire gamut of emo¬
tions. The tearful postwar separations between some of the freed slaves and
their "white folks” did so much to reinforce the self-image of the slavehold¬
ing class that such scenes became a common theme in late-nineteenth-
century southern romanticism. While the stories were often embellished
and exaggerated, they were not without some basis in fact. But with the
passage of time, the chroniclers who regaled new generations with those
scenes tended to forget their exceptional quality. That is, the affections
held by masters and mistresses for their former slaves were almost always
reserved for certain favorites, usually a few of the "uncles” and "aunties”
who had a long record of service to the family. But that said very little
about the ways in which these same masters and mistresses regarded the

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

303

bulk of their blacks. On a plantation in Florida, Susan Bradford, a young
white woman, described the "pitiful” scene in which one of the family
servants left them. The tears flowed freely, there were embraces, and
everyone in the family shared in the prevailing sorrow over losing Nellie.
But this same Susan Bradford, who had been deeply touched by this emo¬
tional parting, thought little about swinging a whip into a group of black
children who had offended her by singing "Well hang Jeff Davis to a sour
apple tree.” If anything, she seemed to relish the opportunity to vent her
anger in this way. "Laying the whip about me with all the strength I could
muster I soon had the whole crowd flying toward the Quarter, screaming
as they went.” The family that bestowed such affection on the parting
Nellie watched the proceedings and thought it amusing that nineteen-year-
old Susan should be striking a black for the first time. 19

If some ex-slaves still commanded the affection and appreciation of
their masters and mistresses because of the quality of their previous ser¬
vice to the family, many others forfeited such consideration by their post¬
emancipation behavior. During slavery, white families had demanded
obedience and passive submission from their blacks. After emancipation,
it proved difficult if not impossible for these same families to accept the
idea that a presidential proclamation, a military order, or even a constitu¬
tional amendment could free the blacks from obligations that they pre¬
sumed immutable. What outraged them was not simply that many blacks
left but that they did so despite the urgent pleas to remain and in a man¬
ner often not in keeping with the deference and humility whites expected
of their black folk. The line between leaving the plantation and inso¬
lence was never altogether clear, as more than one black victim would
discover. 20

Disgruntled planters, or agents acting on their behalf, were not averse
to using forcible means to keep the blacks on the plantations and to punish
those who left. Six former slaves in the Clarendon district of South
Carolina expressed their dissatisfaction with the overseer by leaving the
plantation in a body; the overseer and several neighbors pursued them
with dogs, captured the entire group, shot one who tried to escape and
hanged the others by the roadside. That show of force was sufficient to keep
the remaining hands on the plantation, at least for another month. In
Gates County, North Carolina, a planter explained to his freed slaves that
"he was better used to them than to others” and he urged them to remain
for board, two suits of clothing, and a bonus of "one Sunday suit” upon
completion of the crop. When one of the hands exercised his prerogative
as a free man to decline the offer, the master’s son "flew at him and cuffed
and kicked him”; the others heeded the lesson and indicated they were
"perfectly willing to stay,” but the master still thought it advisable to have
them closely watched. Few masters pursued such matters as relentlessly
as the planter who located in a nearby city the black woman who had left
him and then shot her when she refused to return with him. In reporting

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

this incident for a northern audience, the New York Times correspondent
tried very hard to maintain his detachment—and he succeeded. "Whip¬
ping, paddling, and other customs, peculiar to the palmy days of the institu¬
tion, are practiced, and the negro finds, to his heart’s sorrow, that his
sore-headed master is loath to give him up. There is fault on both sides anrl
equal exaggerations in the representations of difficulties, by both master
and servant.” 21

If the planter could not induce his freed slaves to remain, either by
persuasion or forcible means, he might then call upon local or Federal
officials for assistance, and all too often they readily complied with such
requests. Local police and Home Guard units (often made up of ex-Confed-
erate soldiers) proved particularly effective in "persuading” many freed-
men to return to the plantations on which they had previously worked; the
more recalcitrant ones were likely to be flogged or shot. In Northampton
County, Virginia, the Home Guards shot three freedmen when they re¬
fused to return to their old master after having accepted employment
elsewhere. And in Edgefield, South Carolina, a guerrilla band headed by
Dick Colburn made it "their business” to compel the freed slaves to re main
with their former masters. Much to the bewilderment and consternation
of the freedmen, Federal authorities—both Union Army and Freedmen’s
Bureau officers—actively conspired with planters in numerous instances to
accomplish the same objective, though they were apt to defend their ac¬
tions as in the best interests of the freedmen and the experiment in free
labor. 22

Despite these efforts, many freedmen persisted in separating them¬
selves from their places of bondage. The white South viewed them as taking
to the road without purpose or destination, except to leave those who had
previously cared for them in favor of settling in the nearest town. For the
whites, this aspect of the migration created the most consternation. To see
their former slaves abandon them for no better assurances or offers any¬
where else did little for the master’s view of himself and simply heightened
the bitterness and reinforced the sense of personal "betrayal.” After seeing
a number of blacks leave his plantation, a proprietor in Georgia rode up
to them and demanded to know where they were going. "I don’t know
where I will get to before I stop,” one of the freedmen replied, apparently
in a tone of voice that suggested anything but deference to a superior.
Recounting the incident, Gertrude Thomas explained that only a white
Southerner could have possibly appreciated "the feelings” such a reply
provoked in the offended white man. "Buddy fired his pistol twice,” she
reported, "and created much alarm among them.” 23

That so many ex-slaves left their "white folks” for a difficult and
unknown alternative attests to their remarkable courage and determina¬
tion and to the brittle quality of the "old ties.” Unaccustomed to such
displays of black independence, the old slaveholding class moved quickly
to save itself—to check the movements of the freedmen and to restore
stability to the shattered labor system.

To look at the congested railroad depots, the makeshift camps along the
tracks, the hastily constructed freedmen villages, and the stragglers crowd¬
ing the country roads, bundles under their arms or slung over their shoul¬
ders, many of them hungry, sick, and barely clad, the impression conveyed
was that of an entire people on the move. Such scenes took on, in fact, all
the dimensions of the more classic postwar movements of refugees. Travel¬
ing between Jackson and Vicksburg, a Union Army officer found the roads
filled with "hungry, naked, foot-sore” freedmen and their families, "aliens
in their native land, homeless, and friendless,” some of them becoming
"vagabonds and thieves from both necessity and inclination.” Less sympa¬
thetic was the Freedmen’s Bureau officer who thought most of the ex-slaves
left their homes under the impression "that Freedom relieved them from
Labor.” 24

If native whites and Federal officials perceived thousands of freedmen
on the road with no purpose but to experience the sensation of freedom,
they tended to exaggerate the numbers of such migrants and failed to
appreciate many of the more substantial reasons for moving. For many
black men and women, the post-emancipation migration represented some¬
thing more than mere caprice or wanderlust. To move was to improve their
economic position, to locate family members, to return to the homes from
which they had been removed during the war, and to relocate themselves
in places where they could more readily secure their newly won rights. "I
met men plodding along Virginia and North Carolina roads,” a northern
reporter wrote, "who had come from distant parts of those States, or from
distant States, seeking work or looking for relatives. One man I remember
who had walked from Georgia in the hope of finding at Salisbury a wife
from whom he had been separated years before by sale. In Louisiana, I met
men and women who since the war had made long journeys in order to see
their parents or children.... These were sights that seemed to fill every
white Southerner with anger.” 25

During the war, thousands of slaves had been removed from the threat¬
ened regions, like the South Carolina low country, to the more remote
sections of the state, where they would be out of the path of the Union
Army, insulated from dangerous influences, and still available for some
kind of labor. With the confirmation of their freedom, many of these "ref-
ugeed” blacks wanted to return to their old homes and friends and to the
type of labor with which they were familiar. Not only did they seek employ¬
ment "in labor which they understood better,” one observer noted, but "it
might easily be that no place could well be worse than the region in which
they found themselves when the war closed.” Near Kingsville, South
Carolina, a black refugee camp was made up almost exclusively of men and
women who had worked for a rice planter on the Combahee River before

306

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

being removed to the Richland district, where they were put to work rais¬
ing other crops. For several days, they had been waiting beside the railroad
tracks for transportation to their old residences. '"All we gang o’ nigger is
rice nigger,” they declared, as if that were sufficient explanation. If he
could not obtain a piece of land for himself upon his return, one of the
freedmen declared, he preferred to go back to the old rice plantation and
labor there with his fellow workers for money or shares. 26

With some 125,000 slaves having been removed to Texas during the
war, many of these now joined the steady stream of migrants traveling
along the old San Antonio road, eager to get back to their old homes in
Louisiana, Mississippi, and elsewhere—"or, at all events, to get out of
Texas.” To undertake the trek required considerable fortitude, many freed¬
men preferred to take their chances in Texas, and the decision in some
instances split families asunder, with some returning to the old places and
others remaining in their new homes. "Pappy, him goes back to Louisiana
to massa’s place,” Fred Brown recalled. "Dat am de las’ we hears from him.
Mammy and I goes to Henderson [Texas] and I works at dis and dat and
cares for my mammy ten years, till she dies. Den I gits jobs as cook in Dallas
and Houston and lots of other places.” After being abandoned by then-
master in the regions to which he had removed them, some freedmen were
more than justified in invoking the cry of "ingratitude” and did so. Near
Macon, Georgia, a northern traveler encountered a group of twenty-six
former slaves who had come from Mississippi and were determined to
reach their old homes in South Carolina. "My young master moved to
Mississippi and took us with him,” an elderly freedman explained. "He had
a great many slaves. When de Lord brought freedom to us, why my young
master turned us out, said we was no good, we couldn’t work any, and said
go away.” Such instances may have been exceptional. If the planter did not
feel responsible for his former slaves, he might be sufficiently anxious for
their continued labor to arrange for their transportation to the regions
from which he had removed them. 27

Rather than return to the plantations from which they had recently
been moved, some freedmen chose, as did Cheney Cross’s father, to "put out
for de place where he fust belong”—that is, to the old plantations on which
they had once labored before being sold away. Such destinations were not
nearly as inexplicable as some observers thought. When Jane Sutton, a
Mississippi slave who had been given to her master’s married daughter,
walked "all de way back” to the old place, she had a clear purpose in mind.
"I wanted to see Old Mis’ an’ my Mammy an’ my brothers an’ sisters.” For
a different reason, Andy J. Anderson resolved to return to the plantation
in Williamson County, Texas, from which he had been sold several years
before. After his first master, Jack Haley, had left for military service, the
overseer made life intolerable for the slaves; Anderson was sold to a man
"what hell am too good for” and then sold again to a "good” master. Once
the war ended, he traveled at night and hid by day to avoid the patrollers
and headed back to the old place, where he remained in hiding until Haley

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

307

returned and fired the overseer. Emerging from his father's cabin, Andy
Anderson then greeted his old master—a day he would recall many decades
later as "de happies' time in my life.” 28

When Louisa Adams, a North Carolina freedwoman, returned with
her parents to the same region in which they had been slaves, they did not
go back to the old plantation, which had nothing but bad memories for
them, but went to work for a neighboring planter. This typified the attach¬
ment which numerous ex-slaves felt not so much to the old master or
mistress but to the region they knew most intimately, the familiar sur¬
roundings in which they had been raised. Attachments to "the old range,”
as they called it, often took priority over attractive offers made by planters
elsewhere who were reputed to be good employers. Joseph Maxwell, a
Georgia planter, urged the slaves he had removed to Early County during
the war to stay with him and "be well cared for.” But most of them insisted
on leaving, not because they respected him any less ("We lub de massa an'
work ha'd fo' him”), but because they wanted to return to "de place whar
we libed befo'—Liberty County.” To the astonishment of a Freedmen's
Bureau officer in South Carolina, the blacks who had been removed to the
up-country "were crazy to get back to their native flats of ague and country
fever,” while the "Highland darkeys who had drifted down to the seashore
were sending urgent requests to be Totched home again.' ” 29

Even if only partially understood, the pervasive quality of local attach¬
ments provided some convenient answers to some troublesome questions
about post-emancipation behavior. After examining the prevailing discon¬
tent among the blacks in a freedmen’s camp near Goodrich’s Landing,
Louisiana, a northern reporter ascribed it all to "homesickness,” for few
of them had been raised in this region. "Perhaps the most marked trait in
the negro character,” he suggested, "is his love of home and of the localities
to which he is accustomed. They all pine for their homes. They long for the
old quarters they have lived in; for the old woods they have roamed in, and
the old fields they have tilled.” Several of the physicians in charge of these
camps came up with still another malady peculiar to the Negro psyche—
"homesickness” and "nostalgia.” "They get thinking of their old homes and
if they have left their families, or any part of them behind, they long to see
them, and so they become depressed in spirits and yield readily to the first
attack of disease, or succumb to the depression alone.” Only this strong
local attachment could presumably explain why Lucy Sanders’ mother
returned to her first master, though he had sold his slaves "to obtain the
cash value” in the expectation that they might be emancipated. Whatever
the most compelling reasons for these moves, the results proved quite
acceptable to the planters who stood to gain by their labor. "This love for
home,” a Freedmen's Bureau official in Meridian, Mississippi, predicted,
"will be of great service to us in reorganizing this Country under the new
order of things.” In the lexicon of the Bureau, that meant getting the
ex-slaves back to work. 30

When the war ended, Simon Crum, a black corporal in Higginson's

308

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

regiment, vowed to leave the South altogether. "Fse made up my mind,”
he declared, "dat dese yere Secesh will neber be cibilized in my time.”
Although the explanation seemed plausible enough to many ex-slaves,
particularly after the first year of "freedom,” few of them acted out his
conclusion. Both during and after the war, several groups of freed slaves,
largely women and children, were shipped to northern cities, where they
were placed under the supervision of various benevolent societies. But this
never became a significant movement. The few who did come North in this
fashion were usually employed in domestic jobs. Before the expected ar¬
rival of a hundred Virginia blacks, a New York newspaper announced that
applications were being accepted in the basement of Brooklyn’s Methodist
Episcopal Church for "first-rate domestics.” Most freedmen and freed-
women, however, if they even considered the possibility, rejected migration
to the North as neither feasible nor desirable. Whatever the mammoth
problems of transition they now faced, the ex-slaves seemed to suggest by
their actions that following the North Star no longer constituted the only
way to achieve their freedom. 31

If the North seemed unattractive or impractical, Africa was even more
so. Although several prominent northern blacks had maintained their
commitment to African emigration through the first years of the war, few
of them remained active in the movement after the Emancipation Procla¬
mation. Between 1866 and 1871, however, several thousand blacks, many
of them from South Carolina, did accept the offer of the American Coloniza¬
tion Society for free transportation to Liberia. The explanation offered by
a black colonizationist repeated the familiar argument. "We do not believe
it possible, from the past history and from the present aspect of affairs, for
our people to live in this country peaceably, and educate and elevate their
children to that degree which they desire.” But most of the black leaders
in the North who had enunciated the same position only a few years back
no longer thought it applicable, at least not until disillusionment with the
overthrow of Reconstruction forced a few of them—like Henry McNeal
Turner—to reassess the situation. With black interest in African emigra¬
tion sharply reduced, and in part because of that fact, President Lincoln’s
scheme for removing the bulk of the freed slaves to Africa or Central
America came to very little in the postwar years. "They say that they have
lived here all their days, and there were stringent laws made to keep them
here,” a Virginia freedman explained to a congressional committee, "and
that if they could live here contented as slaves, they can live here when
free.... If we can get lands here and can work and support ourselves, I do
not see why we should go to any place that we do not want to go to.” Nearly
every postwar black convention repeated that same sentiment. 32

For the postwar migrants, Mecca lay neither in the North nor across
the seas but southward, where Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas,
and Texas vied for needed laborers by promising "enormous” wages and
evoked images of opportunity and even lushness. And as with so many
subsequent black migrations, the participants would find upon reaching

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

309

their destinations that the attractions had been exaggerated and the short¬
comings minimized. "I got to Texas and try to work for white folks and try
to farm,” a former Virginia slave recalled. "I couldn’t make anything at
any work. I made $5.00 a month for I don’t know how many year after the
war.” The image of Texas as a 'land of milk and honey” that had sustained
so many involuntary wartime migrants gave way after the war to Florida
as the "land of plenty,” where homesteads were plentiful, wages high, and
laborers scarce. But the rewards proved to be far less than the promise, the
homesteads less than plentiful and difficult to clear and sustain, and many
of the disappointed freedmen had to settle for labor on the plantations. At
the very least, the migrants who reached states like Florida, Arkansas, and
Mississippi secured terms of labor that compared favorably to what they
would have received had they remained in the older states. The Georgia
planters, a northern traveler reported, "haggled at paying their freedmen
six or seven dollars a month, while Arkansas and Mississippi men stood
ready to give twelve and fifteen dollars, and the expenses of the journey.” 33

Throughout those older states, labor agents eagerly sought recruits
and advertised the advantages of their respective regions. All he had to do
to obtain laborers, a Mississippi planter boasted from Eufaula, Alabama,
was to send his "nigger” to talk with the local freedmen. "They had nothin’
to do,” he said of the Alabama blacks, and he could easily outbid his
Georgian competitors who offered only board and clothing. The planter left
Eufaula the next day with sixty-five black recruits. Not all the labor re¬
cruiters were quite this successful; they were apt to encounter not only the
hostility of local whites but the suspicions of blacks who had heard tales
of enticing offers that eventually resulted in sale to Cuba. Nevertheless,
many freedmen listened eagerly to the promises of agents of their own race,
accepted their assurances, and learned something about the biracial na¬
ture of deceit and betrayal.

De white folks would pay niggers to lie to the rest of us niggers to git der
farming done for nothing. He’d tell us come on and go with me, a man
wants a gang of niggers to do some work and he pay you like money
growing on trees. Well we ain’t had no money and ain’t use to none, so
we glad to hear dat good news. We just up and bundle up and go with this
lying nigger. Dey carried us by de droves to different parts of Alabama,
Arkansas and Missouri. After we got to dese places, dey put us all to work
allright on dem great big farms. We all light in and work like old horses,
thinking now we making money and going to git some of it, but we never

did git a cent. We never did git out of debt-All over was like dat. Dem

lying niggers caused all dat. Yes dey did.

Reflecting on the exaggerated claims of labor agents, white and black, John
F. Van Hook, who learned about their operations from his parents in North
Carolina, tended to be more philosophical about the consequences. "Some
of those labor agents were powerful smart about stretching the truth,” he

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

recalled, "but those folks that believed them and left home found out that
it’s pretty much the same the world over, as far as folks and human nature
is concerned.” 34

Despite the alarm they generated among whites, the numbers of ex¬
slaves who moved from state to state never reached the proportions sug¬
gested by contemporary accounts. The reports that blacks were leaving
Georgia "by thousands,” that at least that many South Carolina freedmen
were heading southward, and that Virginia had suffered massive losses,
while essentially accurate in themselves, obscured the fact that most freed
slaves, if they migrated at all, confined those movements within their
respective states and counties. Most significantly, perhaps, they tended to
seek out the counties where their people were already heavily concentrated
and to abandon the areas of white preponderance. That they settled where
the demand for black labor was greatest only partially explains their pref¬
erence; equally important in some regions, racial violence and white hos¬
tility prompted ex-slaves to seek security in numbers, and that in turn
drove them into the Black Belt counties, as in Alabama, and increasingly
into the cities and towns—where, as many blacks thought, "freedom was
free-er.” 35

It might have been any southern town in 1865. Walking through the
outskirts of Macon, Georgia, where the half-built Confederate arsenal
aptly memorialized the recent past, a northern reporter came upon a small
hut in which eleven freedmen resided—an elderly man, a middle-aged
man, three women, and six children. Bundles of old rags provided the only
bedding; several stools, one chair, and half a dozen cooking utensils com¬
prised the furnishings, and a bag of meal and a few pounds of bacon were
on hand to sustain them. That was the extent of their worldly possessions.
The reporter seemed astonished that anyone would have given up the
security of the old plantation for this kind of precarious existence. And
being a reporter, he searched for a plausible explanation.

"Well, Uncle, what did you come up to the city for? Why didn’t you
stay on the old place? Didn’t you have a kind master?”

"I’s had a berry good master, mass’r, but ye see I’s wanted to be free
man.”

"But you were just as free there as you are here.”

"P’r’aps I is, but I’s make a livin’ up yer, I dun reckon; an’ I likes ter
be free man whar I’s can go an’ cum, an’ nobody says not’ing.”

"But you would have been more comfortable on the old place: you
would have had plenty to eat and plenty of clothes to wear.”

"Ye see, mass’r, de good Lo’d he know what’s de best t’ing fur de
brack, well as fur de w’ite; an’ He say ter we dat we should cum up yer,
an’ I don’t reckon He let we starve.”

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

311

Not satisfied with the old man’s explanation, the reporter discussed with
other members of the family the comparative comfort and security afforded
by the old plantation and the town. No matter how he phrased the question,
their responses never varied: they had come to Macon to experience free¬
dom. Near Milledgeville, the reporter encountered still more rural blacks,
living in overcrowded cabins, trying to make a new life for themselves, and
he asked the same question of them. Although conceding that they lived
in "hard times,” none of them regretted having left the countryside for the
city. "Wa’l now ye see, sah,” a father of seven children tried to explain, "das
a Scriptur’ what says if de man hab a little to eat, an’ he eat with a ’tented
mind, he be better off dan de man what hab de fat ox an’ isn’t ’tented.” 36

The size of the city or town to which many blacks flocked after emanci¬
pation mattered less than the freedom, the opportunities, the protection,
and the camaraderie they expected to find there. "Nobody took our homes
away, but right off colored folks started on the move,” Felix Haywood
recalled. "They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know
what it was—like it was a place or a city.” 37 Even the smallest village had
a certain attractive quality about it, particularly for the ex-slaves whose
previous world had been restricted to the boundaries of the plantation. But
most of the migrants to the towns appear to have come from the nearby
plantations; some of them had been hired out before the war as slaves to
city employers, they were largely familiar with the offerings of the city, and
they knew from their own observations that some free blacks had fared
comparatively well there.

Regardless of where they came from, or their degree of familiarity with
urban life, the compulsions that had driven them to the nearest town or
village varied but slightly. When Henry Bobbitt, who had spent his bond¬
age in Warren County, North Carolina, walked all the way to Raleigh, he
recalled the need "ter find out if I wuz really free.” Jordon Smith, who had
been sent from Georgia to Texas during the war, headed straight for
Shreveport, Louisiana, because he knew Yankee soldiers were stationed
there. Several freedmen who left Dinwiddie County, Virginia, were deter¬
mined to reach Richmond, if only because it had to be better than what they
had left behind them. "I thought I couldn’t be no wus off than whar I was,”
one of them explained; "and I hadn’t no place to go. You see, mahster, thar
a’n’t no chance fo’ people o’ my color in the country I come from.” An
Alabama planter, distraught over his losses, looked on helplessly as the
blacks in his region headed for Selma "to be free” and "to embrace the
nigger lovers. ” Equally concerned, a former Confederate officer found the
roads to Vicksburg clogged with blacks anxious "to get their freedom,” and
a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in Coahoma County, Mississippi, encountered
four field hands on the road who had little idea of what they would do when
they reached the city but assumed that "once in Memphis and they are all
right.” He ordered them all to return to the plantation. 38

The popular idea that "freedom was free-er” in the towns and that they
could live "much easier” there helped to sustain the migrants, even as
native whites, Federal officials, and northern reporters dismissed their

312

been in the storm so long

assumptions as "absurd.” The blacks clearly had reason to think otherwise.
After describing the brutal treatment accorded freed slaves in Warren
County, Georgia, the black newspaper in Augusta found it hardly surpris¬
ing that so many freedmen would prefer to take their chances in the city
rather than on the more remote and exposed plantations and farms. With
violence and confusion rampant in some regions, the mere presence of a
small detachment of Federal troops in the nearest town might turn it into
a freedmen’s refuge; they "seek the safe shelter of the cities,” a traveler
wrote from Charleston, "solely from the blind instinct that where there is
force there must be protection.” The nearest town also often housed the
local Freedmen’s Bureau office, to which blacks could bring their problems,
settle conflicts over wages, and obtain some measure of relief in the form
of government food rations. "Beaufort was their Mecca,” an observer wrote
of black refugees in the Sea Islands region, "and their shrine the office of
the General Superintendent of Freedmen, who at this period worked eight
days a week, besides Sundays.” 39

No doubt many blacks simply wanted the comfort of numbers, the
chance to live with large groups of their own race away from the constant
scrutiny of the master or overseer. Outside of the largest plantations, the
city afforded freedmen expanded opportunities to think and act as part of
a black community; moreover, they felt free to exercise their newly won
liberties in ways that would invite trouble in the countryside. To be in the
city gave them readier access to the black churches and the black benevo¬
lent societies; they could partake more freely of the growing interest in
political questions, and, most important of all, they were able to send their
children to the newly established freedmen’s schools. In describing black
life in postwar Macon, a northern reporter may have inadvertently hit
upon precisely the combination of attractions that lured so many planta¬
tion freedmen to the city: four "prosperous” churches (one Methodist, one
Presbyterian, and two Baptist); several benevolent societies (which con¬
tributed monthly support to the "parentless and indigent”); and five
schools, four of which were taught by blacks. In addition, a Freedmen’s
Bureau officer willingly listened to their grievances. 40

Whether they had worked for "kind” or "mean” masters, significant
numbers of freed slaves resolved to abandon plantation labor altogether.
Heading for the urban centers, they hoped to secure positions that afforded
more pay, personal independence, and a welcome relief from the plantation
routines. Those who had labored on the plantations as blacksmiths, millers,
mechanics, carpenters, and wheelwrights hoped to capitalize on the same
skills in the cities, where they would join black artisans who had long
dominated several of the skilled urban occupations. Former house ser¬
vants, on the other hand, tended to seek similar positions in the cities or
worked as waiters, hackmen, and seamstresses, while field hands might
become stevedores, porters, laundresses, or menial laborers. 41 In Rich¬
mond, blacks still comprised nearly half the work force of the Tredegar
Iron Works, and the manager showed no inclination to reduce that propor-

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

313

tion, despite the reluctance of newly imported white workers from Phila¬
delphia to labor alongside blacks. "We dont want any men to come here
who object to working with a colored man,” the manager insisted. "We
Southern men regard Negroes as an inferior race, but we make no distinc¬
tion of color in employing men and pay all the same wages as all have to
live.” 42

Although coming to the city hardly made any of the freedmen rich, and
despite the many betrayed expectations, some nevertheless managed to
achieve for themselves and their families a more meaningful and satisfying
way of life than they would have enjoyed on the plantations. When Charles
Crawley accompanied his family to Petersburg, two weeks after Lee’s sur¬
render, he left behind a master and mistress who "wus good to me as well
as all us slaves,” but the Crawleys were determined "to make a home fo’
ourselves.” After working "here an’ dar, wid dis here man an’ dat man,”
they purchased a home and remained there for the rest of their lives. As
slaves, Mary Jane Wilson’s parents were owned by different masters and
hence lived separately; after the war, her father reunited the family in
Portsmouth, Virginia, went to work in the Norfolk navy yard as a teamster,
purchased a lot and built his own house. "He was one of the first Negro land
owners in Portsmouth after emancipation,” she proudly recalled. After
attending the local school, Mary Jane Wilson graduated from Hampton
Institute and then returned to Portsmouth as one of the first black teachers
in that town. "I opened a school in my home, and I had lots of students.
After two years my class grew so fast and large that my father built a school
for me in our back yard-Those were my happiest days.” 43

Frequently, success in the city consisted more of personal satisfaction
than significant material gain. But the examples of blacks who achieved
both goals encouraged still others to take their chances. Between 1860 and
1870, census statistics confirmed what the white South had already
strongly suspected—a striking increase in the black urban population. In
Mississippi, for example, the black population of Vicksburg, to which so
many slaves had fled during the war, tripled while that of Natchez more
than doubled; the four largest cities in Alabama—Mobile, Montgomery,
Selma, and Huntsville—showed an increase of more than 57 percent in
black residents; three of Virginia’s principal cities—Richmond, Norfolk,
and Lynchburg—now had nearly as many blacks as whites, and Petersburg
found itself with a black majority; in Charleston, too, blacks moved into a
majority position, while the black population of Memphis increased with
a rapidity that made it a likely candidate for a race riot. 44 In the smaller
towns and villages, comparable and more keenly felt increases in black
residents took place. Even if the actual number of blacks moving into a
town remained relatively small, it might be sufficient to change the charac¬
ter of the community. The Black Belt town of Demopolis, Alabama, where
the slaves were observed in a "state of excitement and jubilee” after being
told of their freedom, had but one black resident officially listed in 1860;
within the next decade, however, nearly a thousand blacks settled in

314

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Demopolis, perhaps in part because of the decision of the Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau to locate a regional office there. 45

If whites had exercised some perspective in viewing these increases,
they might have been less alarmist in their reactions. Despite the number
of new black urbanites, the overwhelming majority of black people re¬
mained in the rural areas. To have heard the whites talk, however, any
observer might have thought that the fields were being literally emptied
of laborers. 'They all want to go to the cities, either Charleston or
Augusta,” Henry Ravenel complained. 'The fields have no attractions.”
The very language employed by Freedmen’s Bureau officials and native
whites to describe the black migration to the cities suggested something
akin to an invasion. The freed slaves were reported to be "crowding every
road” in Alabama leading to the principal towns, and Montgomery had
become "crowded, crammed, packed with multitudes of lazy, worthless
negroes”; they were also sighted "flocking” to Savannah, Atlanta, and
Houston; "an exodus” threatened to flood Albany, Georgia; Charleston had
been "overrun” by blacks of "all sorts and conditions,” while Mobile reeled
under waves of immigrants. "Mobile is thronged to a fearful excess,” a
Freedmen’s Bureau official reported, "their manner of living there is de¬
structive to their morals and life. These noisome tenements are over¬
crowded with these miserable people.” 46

Even an insignificant number of black migrants aroused cries of inun¬
dation, partly out of the expectation that many more would follow. What
they were viewing seemed clear enough to the white South: a once produc¬
tive labor force, released from proper supervision, filled the cities and
towns as vagrants, thieves, and indigents, threatening to place an intolera¬
ble burden on taxpayers and charitable services. "Before the war,” a news¬
paper in Baton Rouge observed, "there were but six hundred Negroes in

this place. Now there are as many thousand-We have to support them,

nurse them, and bury them.” With increasing reports of petty crimes com¬
mitted by the newcomers, the outrage mounted, and the ways in which
blacks allegedly comported themselves in the cities fired the indignation
in places like Memphis until it reached explosive dimensions.

The streets [of Memphis] are filled with them, and at every corner are
seen knots of them playing, idling, and sleeping in the sun. The shops are
overflowing with them, squandering on themselves and each other what
little money they have acquired in anything that strikes their fancy. On
the outskirts of the city are small towns made up of rude and wretched
hovels that have been collected during the war, built by the negroes
themselves, in which a very considerable population live, and where
disease and vice in their most loathsome and revolting characters
abound.

That observation, in a leading Memphis newspaper, appeared less than two
months before the violent riot that would claim forty-eight lives. 47

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

315

Not only were these country invaders said to be rude and impertinent,
but their penchant for ostentatious display affronted a people long accus¬
tomed to monopolizing such behavior.

You will see faces black as ebony arrayed in silks & satins, of all the colors
of the rainbow, with little white chip hats streaming with ribbons of all
colors perched on their heads, & their faces covered with blue & brown
veils, (to prevent their black faces, I suppose, from being bleached)—in
fact Ring St. is crowded with them all day, it is their great promenade.

Still worse, blacks allegedly adopted a "manner of living” in the cities that
would inevitably lead to the moral degeneration of both races. "For a
plantation girl to go to Beaufort and stay six months,” a northern lessee
wrote in September 1865, "is almost sure ruin,” and the whites, he added,
were not without blame. "If you hear a man cursing the race as a lying,
thieving, licentious race, you may be almost sure that he is paying money
to a black woman.” It seemed to him, in fact, that at least half of Beaufort,
Yankee officers and native whites alike, were "corrupt with this infernal
lust for black women.” With the infusion of country blacks, city dwellers
also complained of noisy nights and entire neighborhoods kept awake by
drunken frolics and "orgies.” "Truly freedom down in the low country has
passed from the Southerner to the negro,” a South Carolina woman
confided to her diary, "and our beloved city has become Pandemonium.” 48

Whether in Chicago and New York in the next century or in southern
cities in the post-Civil War years, black residents of long standing tended
to give the new arrivals a mixed reception, even sharing at times with the
whites a disdain for the rustic manners, crude life styles, and shabby attire
of the newcomers. To a white observer in Charleston, for example, it
seemed as if the older black residents found the newly freed slaves a source
of embarrassment.

The really respectable class of free negroes, whom we used to employ as
tailors, boot makers, mantua makers, etc. wont associate at all with the
"parvenue free” ... They are exceedingly respectful to the Charleston
gentlemen they meet—taking their hats off and expressing their plea¬
sure at seeing them again, but regret that it is under such circumstances,
enquiring about others, etc.

Nor did the older black residents necessarily welcome the prospect of
competing with the migrants for the available jobs, and some would recall
with bitterness how the new arrivals had subsisted on the government’s
bounty during and immediately after the war.

The slaves that was freed, and the country Negroes that had been run
off, or had run away from the plantations, was staying in Augusta in
Guv’ment houses, great big ole barns. They would all get free provisions

316

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

from the Freedmen’s Bureau, but people like us, Augusta citizens, didn’t
get free provisions, we had to work. It spoiled some of them. 49

To many apprehensive whites, the city had always undermined the
manners and discipline of rural black folk. The way in which a South
Carolina planter described the "defection” of one of his servants after the
war typified this attitude: "Bob is somewhere about the City [Charleston],
going to ruin.” Since at least the 1850s, if not earlier, city officials had tried
to restrict the movement and activities of urban blacks, encouraging and
in some instances virtually forcing slave owners to move their city slaves
back to the plantations, where they could be more easily controlled. The
city, these whites had insisted, bred only discontent and independence, and
that was the stuff of which insurrections were made. With equal alarm,
whites responded to the postwar movement of freed slaves into the urban
centers and resolved to check it. "At one time,” Elias Horry Deas of
Charleston informed his daughter, "I was opposed to the expelling of all
Negroes from the City but now that I know them, I am fully for doing so
except those that may be personally attending on you. A negro ... has not
as much gratitude about him as many of the inferior animals.” With that
observation, he not only caught the urgency of the problem but the spirit
in which native whites and Federal officers sought to overcome it. 50

Although sometimes motivated by different considerations, Federal au¬
thorities and native whites often worked in close harmony to curb black
movement into the cities and to force the freed slaves back onto the planta¬
tions. Few northern whites espoused the cause of the ex-slave more force¬
fully than Clinton B. Fisk, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer who commanded
the respect of most blacks. And when he admonished them to remain on
the plantations, few doubted that he thought this the best way for them
eventually to realize their aspirations. In the congested cities, Fisk warned,
"you will wear your lives away in a constant struggle to pay hig h rent for
miserable dwellings and scanty allowances of food. Many of your children,
I greatly fear, will be found wandering through the streets as vagrants—
plunging into the worst of vices, and filling the workhouses and jails.” 51

Invoking almost the same images, black leaders, newspapers, and con¬
ventions repeated the same advice and affirmed the agrarian mystique to
which most Americans—white and black—still adhered. "He that tilleth
the land shall have plenty of bread,” declared the black newspaper in
Augusta, Georgia, and others played on that same theme. The freed slaves
who came to the cities exposed themselves to "high rents,” "exorbitant
prices,” and unemployment, whereas in the country they "can always
make a living,” perhaps even save enough to purchase at some future H at*.

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

317

their own farms. "You have no trade adapted to city life,” one black editor
advised the freedmen. That being the case, he warned, they would be
compelled to find alternatives to legitimate occupations if they persisted in
settling in urban centers.

Many who flock to these large cities are very apt to partake of all the vices
prevalent, such as rum drinking, playing cards, picking pockets, and
knocking men down with bludgeons for the sake of a little recreation....

What little money you may have will soon be squandered in loathsome
rumshops, generally kept by those who are negro-haters, although they
profess to be "frinds” while your money lasts.... If you carry on in this
way, you will soon become strolling vagabonds, and honest men will shun
you.

Few agrarian leaders set forth as cogently the evils that lurked in the city.
In addressing the recently freed blacks of Maryland, Frederick Douglass,
who had himself drifted toward the city as a fugitive slave, tried to disabuse
their minds of the notion that urban living and freedom were somehow
inseparable. "I believe $150 in the country is better than $400 in the city,”
he insisted. Since fewer temptations existed in the country to lead them
astray, they would live more economically, accumulate their savings, and
become landowners. "If the colored people of Maryland flock to Baltimore,
crowding the alleys and by-streets, woe betide them! Sad, indeed, will be
their fate! They must stick to the country, and work.” Whoever they lis¬
tened to, whites or blacks, the freedmen might have heard those words
repeated in various forms. 52

To make certain that the ex-slaves heeded this advice, city authorities
moved to restrict, harass, and expel them, not always bothering to distin¬
guish between the older black residents and the newcomers or even be¬
tween the gainfully employed and the "vagrants.” In Richmond, the
post-emancipation "jubilee” had hardly ended before black residents com¬
plained of treatment "worse than ever we suffered before,” including daily
mounted patrols reminiscent of the much-dreaded patrollers and the re¬
vival of the old pass system.

We are required to get some white person to give us passes to attend to
our daily occupations, without which we are marched off to the Old Rebel
Hospital, now called the negro bull pen.... We saw women looking for
their husbands, children for parents, but to no purpose—for they were in

the bull pen_All that is needed to restore Slavery in full is the auction-

block as it used to be.

The white residents of Richmond, another black protested, still clung to
and acted by the old motto: "Hickory stick growing in the ground, if you
aint got one cent keep the nigger down.” Despite personal appeals to Presi¬
dent Johnson, including a delegation of Richmond blacks, little was done
to resolve their grievances; by August 1865, local blacks met again, this

318

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

time to protest a series of outrages, involving not only the white citizenry
and police but Union soldiers—"'those individuals whom we all regarded as
our friends, and hailed as our deliverers.” 53

If freedmen came to the cities because of the reassuring presence of
Union troops and a Freedmen’s Bureau office, and some apparently did,
they might be bitterly disappointed over the quality of their reception and
treatment. Not only did Federal authorities afford them minimal protec¬
tion or none at all but Union commanders were most likely to greet the new
arrivals by advising them to return to work for their former masters, who
knew them best and would thus be more sympathetic to their problems.
The slaves who had fled during the war to places like New Orleans and
Natchez had already seen such advice translated into orders and vigorously
enforced. Consistent with wartime policies, Federal officials were as eager
as the planters themselves to return the freed slaves to plantation labor
and they willingly supplied the necessary force to implement such deci¬
sions. Scarcely a day passed without complaints by urban blacks of mis¬
treatment, arbitrary arrests, the suspension of food rations, robbery, and
outright brutality at the hands of occupation troops. "It appears that all
the jail birds of New York, and the inmates of Moyamensing had been left
in this State to guard the freedmen’s interest,” a black correspondent wrote
from South Carolina in July 1866. "No Southern white man in Charleston,
has heaped as much insult upon colored females passing the streets, as
those foul-throated scamps who guard this city.” 54

The vigor with which Union officers acted to restrain urban blacks won
some grudging admiration from local whites. When the Union commander
in Galveston ordered freedmen with neither a "home” nor a "master” to
be put to work on the streets, a Houston newspaper was both relieved and
grateful that the blacks had been brought "to common sense in a summary
manner.” Nor were Galveston’s mayor and city council displeased when
the Union commander suggested that they adopt an ordinance punishing
"all hired servants” who left their employers before the expiration of their
contracts. But for the recently freed slaves, the actions of the Union Army
deepened their disillusionment and frustrations. "It is not the Southerners
we dread but the Federal soldiers,” a group of blacks in Mobile, Alabama,
declared as they petitioned the Freedmen’s Bureau for help. Not long after
the war had ended, Henry McNeal Turner, while still a chaplain in a black
regiment, insisted that white troops were unfit to garrison the South. Not
one in twenty, he thought, would treat the freedmen with any justice or
respect; many soldiers, in fact, cursed, threatened, and whipped blacks "to
gratify some 'secesh belle,’ or to keep the good will of some Southerner who
can keep a sumptuous table. I have been told, over and over, by colored
persons, that they were never treated more cruelly, than they were by some
of the white Yankees.” 55

Whether undertaken by Federal authorities or by native whites, the
efforts to control urban blacks and to forestall the urbanization of blacks
began to assume a familiar pattern throughout the South. In Mobile, the

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

319

mayor instructed the police to arrest "vagrants” and warned freedmen
either to find employment, leave the city, or be forced to work on the
streets. "If the white class was treated in the like manner,” a black resident
observed, "I would not complain.” If black "vagrants” were not fined and
sent to the workhouse (as in Nashville and New Orleans), they were put
to work on the streets to pay for their room and board at the jail (as in San
Antonio and Montgomery) or simply compelled to return to their previous
owners (as in Lexington, Kentucky). 56 Rather than enforce the vagrancy
laws against freedmen, numerous communities (such as New Orleans and
Savannah), often with the full support of military authorities, preferred to
revive the old curfew and pass regulations, resorting at times to mass
arrests of blacks found on the city streets after a certain hour without the
permission of their employers. Faced with the possibility of overcrowded
jails, city authorities happily complied with the offers of local residents and
planters to pay the fines of the blacks in exchange for their employment
as virtual indentured servants. 57

If enforcement of vagrancy and curfew laws proved insufficient to deal
with the problem, or if Federal officials were unwilling to approve such
laws, urban whites relied on more ingenious and imaginative solutions to
check the number of black residents in their midst. Imposing heavy license
fees and taxes on the occupations which freedmen were most likely to enter
might produce the desired results and also suggested that whites were less
concerned about "vagrancy” than about ex-slaves working in non-agricul-
tural pursuits. Without the need for any special laws, community pressure
was often sufficient to deny jobs and housing to incoming blacks; any whites
who defied those pressures were apt to find themselves homeless—the
victims of organized arsonists. In New Orleans, insurance companies con¬
sidered withdrawing coverage from all dwellings in which blacks resided,
on the pretext that colored people were "inflammable matter.” In reporting
this threat, the local black newspaper urged black citizens to form their
own insurance companies. 58

To break up the urban black settlements, like the shanty villages
appearing on the edges of numerous towns, local authorities might simply
order their demolition. To justify such arbitrary actions, they would cite
the outbreak of disease among malnourished and ill-clad freedmen and the
need to protect the health of the community. That was the only excuse
officials in Meridian, Mississippi, needed before they broke up the freed-
men’s camps, burned down the makeshift dwellings, and drove the inhabi¬
tants from the town. To protect the townspeople of Selma, Alabama,
allegedly from a smallpox epidemic, city officials barred any freedmen who
did not have the written approval of an employer. Why an employer’s
consent would have made the community less susceptible to disease was
not explained. 59

No doubt some communities simply took their cue from the Union
Army’s wartime experiment in preventive medicine in Natchez. To protect
both the Union troops and the city’s residents, A. W. Kelly, an army

320

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

surgeon and the chief health officer, thought it essential to remove any
possible sources of "pestilential diseases,” and there was no question in his
mind about where to look—in precisely the same places nearby planters
were looking for needed laborers.

Large numbers of idle negroes ... now throng the streets, lanes and
alleys, and over-crowd every hovel. Lazy and profligate, unused to caring
for themselves; thriftless for the present, and recklessly improvident of
the future, the most of them loaf idly about the streets and alleys, prowl¬
ing in secret places, and lounge lazily in crowded hovels, which soon
become dens of noisome filth, the hot beds, fit to engender and rapidly
disseminate the most loathsome and malignant diseases.

No "contraband” would be permitted to remain in Natchez unless em¬
ployed by a "responsible white person in some legitimate business” and
unless he or she lived with the employer. Clearly, then, household servants
and virtually no one else would be exempt, even if that meant arbitrarily
separating families. The first roundup, in fact, took place appropriately
enough at the freedmen’s school, with the children herded off to a nearby
contraband camp. Although they were subsequently returned, the poten¬
tial of the order had been clearly revealed. Not only did the action alarm
the black residents of Natchez but it infuriated the black soldiers stationed
nearby, many of whom had wives and children in the city. "I heard colored
soldiers yesterday in their madness swear desperately that they would
have revenge,” a white missionary reported. "And they will. I tremble as
do so many of the officers in the colored regiments, when I witness such
expressions & conduct of the soldiers.” Perhaps only the threatened
mu tin y of these black troops prompted a modification of the order and the
dismissal of both the health officer and the Union commander who had
supported him. More than a year later, however, in June 1865, a black
correspondent in Natchez described a deplorable state of affairs which
suggested how much local authorities had learned from their Yankee con¬
querors.

A rebel doctor is appointed on the Health Board. The consequence is, on
the pretext of generating the yellow disease among them, (which is not
an epidemic with colored people,) the colored people are forcibly carried
out of the town. Many are taken from their employment, and their
humble, though comfortable houses, built by their own industry, are torn
down before their tearful eyes, and they are huddled into a swamp or
plain, some distance from town, without employment, to starve, or return
to their rebel master.

And this time, no black soldiers were in the vicinity to check such activi¬
ties. 80

Although some of the older black residents liked to think of themselves
as different from the new arrivals from the countryside, they quickly dis-

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

321

covered that the restrictions, harassment, and violence were directed
against the entire black community. Enforcement of the vagrancy laws
revealed an all too familiar double standard. If a white man was out of
work, as many were in 1865, that was simply unemployment, but if a black
man had no job, that was vagrancy. If a planter refused to till the fields
himself, that was understandable, but if a former slave declined to work
for him, that was idleness if not insolence. Having perceived the rationale
that guided the actions of white authorities, a black editor angrily de¬
nounced the arrest of black "vagrants” in Mobile. The laziest class in
society, he charged, had to be the planters themselves. "They are lazy
enough not to work themselves; but they want to live as parasites on the
proceeds of other people's labor. This time is past; inde irae . Laziness,
gentlemen, is on your side. We want to work, but not for you; we want to
work freely and voluntarily—for ourselves.” Nevertheless, the arrest of
"vagrants” persisted, cheered on by groups of unemployed whites loitering
nearby. 61

Under circumstances that were difficult and often perilous, urban
blacks tried to develop some community strength and response. In Tus¬
caloosa, Alabama, black residents met to protest illegal house searches and
legislation that would deny them the right to rent either land or houses
within the town limits. In petitioning the Freedmen’s Bureau for help, they
simply noted that "this is not the pursuit of happiness, therefore We hope
you will help us out.” After enduring a series of "abuses,” including the
arrest of blacks coming into town to make some purchases, Vicksburg
freedmen held a public meeting in which they protested police harassment
and "disgraceful proceedings” in the civil courts. In the smaller towns,
often removed from any Federal "protection,” the complaints sounded far
more desperate. From Tuscumbia, Alabama, Jim Leigh and forty-seven
other black residents voiced their disappointment over the limited amount
of freedom they were permitted to enjoy. Local stores would sell them
nothing ("We get a White man to get it for us”), and although some of them
paid taxes like the white residents, they were still unable to get a school
for their children. Nor could they purchase liquor without an order from
a white man, or establish an independent business, such as a grocery. They
could not even act in their own self-defense. "If a White Man Strik you
With a Rock you are not Lowed to Look mad at him.” What was left but
for them to appeal to the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency which had been
established, they had heard, to look after their interests. "Send us Sum
help. We want Justice. We Want Justice. Gennel you can Send us one
Company if you please. We are treted here like dogs.” 62

Whatever their expectations in coming to the cities, many of the mi¬
grants discovered that their new freedom counted for far less than they had
imagined. Former field hands were forced to eke out an existence in the
most menial jobs, at least those they could wrest from the former residents
who had been practicing them. To a black woman in Atlanta, for example,
a mother of six children, whose husband had died "fighting for de Yan-

322

been in the storm so long

j£ 0 @g ? ” survival depended essentially on how much wash she could take in
each day. "Sometimes I gits along tolerable,” she sighed; "sometimes right
slim; but dat’s de way wid everybody;—times is powerful hard right now;’
Even the plantation artisans and mechanics who had come to the cities
with higher expectations found, along with the older residents, declining
opportunities to practice those skills. With emancipation, whites began to
challenge the virtual monopoly which blacks had enjoyed in various urban
occupations, not only in the skilled trades but in the menial jobs once
considered beneath the dignity of whites. Of course, if those jobs could be
reserved for whites, that would lend them sufficient dignity. In Petersburg,
Virginia, the local newspaper perceived significant changes in urban labor
as early as August 1865:

Formerly a white drayman or cartman or hack-driver was a sight
unknown to our streets, now they share these employments with the
blacks, and eventually will monopolize them.... Formerly, most, if not
all, of our bars were tended by colored men, though owned by whites;
now, the cobblers and juleps are mixed, as well as the rent paid, and the
stock kept up by white men in many instances. Formerly, the restaurants
of Petersburgh were almost exclusively in the hands of the colored peo¬
ple; now, we believe, there is but one establishment of the sort in the city.
Formerly, we had only colored barbers; now, the native whites seek,
generally, barbers of their own color, and eventually, they will do so
exclusively . 63

The black families which migrated to the cities and decided to remain
were apt to discover that the struggle for survival deprived them of some
of the advantages that had initially attracted them there. After the war,
Jennylin Dunn recalled, her parents moved into the nearest city—Raleigh,
North Carolina. Although they managed fairly well in their new environ¬
ment, Jennylin Dunn never realized her ambition to attend any of the
schools the Yankees had established for the freed slaves. The reason she
cited told the story of countless others. "Most o’ us wuz so busy scramblin'
roun' makin' a livin' dat we ain't got no time fer no schools .'' 64

Despite the alarm over inundation of the towns and cities, the ex-slaves
who moved immediately after emancipation generally confined themselves
to the countryside and traveled only a short distance . 65 No matter how
close they stayed to the old place, however, the farmers and planters who
had lost them as laborers were as distressed as if they had moved to the
nearest town. To check such interplantation movement, some former slave¬
holders, as in Lowndes County, Alabama, agreed among themselves not to

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

323

hire any freedman within ten miles of his former home. But to implement
that decision, the labor supply would have to be plentiful and the planters
would have to remain unified, and such situations were uncommon, espe¬
cially in the immediate aftermath of the war. 66

Within several months after the end of the war, the first wave of
post-emancipation migration subsided, most of the migrants having reset¬
tled in areas with which they were familiar. H. R. Brinkerhoff, a Union
officer stationed near Clinton, Mississippi, initially accepted the prevailing
view that freed slaves from all parts of the countryside were converging on
the towns and cities. After further observation, however, he realized that
he had exaggerated both the numbers of blacks involved and the extent of
their movements. The migrants who came to the cities, he concluded in
July 1865, comprised "a very small part of the whole,” and almost all of
these had previously worked on plantations nearby. By the end of 1865, the
chief of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Alabama claimed to have "no further
fear of the wandering propensities of the negro”; the end of slavery, he
reported, had been "naturally followed by a jubilee; but that is over now.”
Actually, his optimism proved to be unjustified. Once the 1865 crops were
completed and new contracts had to be negotiated, many freedmen who
had stayed on the plantations after emancipation chose this moment to
move elsewhere, not so much to seek their fortunes in the cities as to
improve their prospects on another place. But movement in itself, as many
of them discovered, only assured them of different faces directing their
labor rather than significant changes in the labor itself or in the rewards
they reaped from it. "It wus like dis,” a former North Carolina slave
explained, "a crowd of tenants would get dissatisfied on a certain planta¬
tion, dey would move, an' another gang of niggers move in. Dat wus all any
of us could do. We wus free but we had nothin' 'cept what de marsters give
us.” 67

If any "new” migrants headed for the cities in late 1865, they most
likely encountered many of their people on the roads going in the other
direction—back to the old places. Mounting pressure from Federal author¬
ities to contract with an employer or be arrested as vagrants, the hostile
reception they had received in the urban centers, and the declining hope
for any kind of land distribution had forced many ex-slaves to reassess their
lives, recognize the limitations of their freedom, and face up to the urgent
need to survive. Near Mobile, Alabama, 900 freedmen held a mass meeting
to voice their disappointment over the government's failure to provide for
them and voted 700 to 200 to return to their former masters. The stories
of disillusioned migrants soon assumed a familiar pattern. After spending
one year in a nearby town, Jacob and Lucy Utley decided they had had
enough. Cramped conditions in a rat-infested dwelling and a steady diet of
hardtack and pickled meat finally persuaded them to return to the old
plantation. With equal dismay, John Petty, a former slave in Spartanburg
County, South Carolina, was forced to reexamine the decision he had made.
The one slave who chose to leave the plantation immediately after the war

d * 4 BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

had returned with a glowing picture of opportunities for young blacks in
the cities. Up in Winston,” he had reported, "all the niggers make five
dollars a day; how come you don’t go up there and git rich like I is.” The
other blacks had laughed at his story, refusing to believe any portion of it.
But young Petty eighteen years old at the time of emancipation—waited
for the crop to be completed and then informed his old master that he
intended to leave for the "north” to make his fortune. He promised the
others that he would return and bring them "something.” But Winston
proved to be less of a Promised Land than he had expected.

It was that hard, a-cleaning and a-washing all the time. ’Cause I never
knowed nothing ’bout no ’baccy and there wasn’t nothing that I could
turn off real quick that would bring me no big money. It got cold and I
never had no big oak-logs to bum in my fireplace and I set and shivered
till I lay down. Then it wasn’t no kiwer like I had at Marse Jim’s. Up
there they never had ’nough wood to keep no fire all night. Next thing
I knowed I was down with the grippe and it took all the money dat I had
and then I borrowed some to pay the doctor.

He returned to the plantation, empty-handed, thinking himself "a fool” for
ever having left. "I ax where that nigger what ’ticed me off to the north
and they all low that he done took the consumption and died soon after
I done gone from home. I never had no consumption, but it took me long
time to git over the grippe. I goes to old Marse and hires myself out and
I never left him no more till the Lawd took him away.” 68

Like John Petty, many of the migrants drifted back to the old places,
their dreams and expectations of a different way of life having yielded them
only frustration and a sense of betrayal. To return to the familiar sur¬
roundings often became a matter of survival rather than homesickness or
attachment to "old Marse.” "The Freedmen’s Bureau helped us some,”
Squire Dowd recalled, "but we finally had to go back to the plantation in
order to live.” Along the wharves in Charleston, a northern visitor encoun¬
tered some 1,500 freedmen waiting for transportation back to their old
homes, some of them also resigned to resuming the old way of life, others
hopeful they might attain something better. "We wants to git away to work
on our own hook,” one of them explained. "It’s not a good time at all here.
We does nothing but suffer from smoke and ketch cold. We wants to begin
de planting business. An elderly black woman, who had been waiting here
for more than two weeks, poured out her feelings of frustration and con¬
cluded with a dim view of her future prospects. "De jew and de air hackles
we more ’n anyting. De rain beats on we, and de sun shines we out. My

chil’n so hungry dey can’t hole up. De Gov’ment, he han’t gib we nottin’_

Some libs and some dies. If dey libs dey libs, and if dey dies dey dies.” 89

The sight of former slaves returning, many of them thoroughly disillu¬
sioned with "freedom” and Yankee promises, no doubt pleased and reas¬
sured planter families. That some of their former slaves should have

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

325

traveled a great distance to be back on the old place impressed the daughter
of a Georgia planter as "a fact that speaks louder than words as to their
feeling for their old master and former treatment.” The talk in the Chesnut
family was of the plight of "poor Old Myrtilia,” who had left with the
Yankees and now wrote "the most pathetic letters” asking to be returned.
When no one in the Chesnut family offered to help her, she managed to get
back on her own. That impressed Mary Chesnut, who concluded that Myr¬
tilia, like so many ex-slaves after the "first natural frenzy of freedom,” had
simply discovered "on which side her bread was buttered” and "where her
real friends were.” With similar confidence, former slaveholders looked
upon the return of blacks as a step closer to a resumption of the old
relationships that had characterized bondage. "My own negro boy, whom
I have owned since infancy,” a Virginia physician testified, "has returned

to me-He has returned to his old status. The feeling between the

negroes and their former masters seems to be perfectly kind; I see the
negroes working as usual.” 70

That confidence rested in some instances on the satisfaction evinced
by their former slaves in returning to the old places and positions. If some
still harbored feelings of bitterness and disappointment over their fate,
they seemed to appreciate the greater measure of security they now en¬
joyed and the chance to renew old friendships among those with whom they
had shared bondage. Not long after the war, Mary Anderson recalled, her
former master and mistress went out in a carriage to relocate their former
slaves. With apparent ease, they persuaded many of them to return, and
it seemed as if little had changed, with the blacks still addressing the
whites as "master” and "missus” and resuming their usual tasks and
demeanor. "My father and mother, two uncles and their families moved
back,” Mary Anderson remembered. "Also Lorenza Brodie, and John Bro-
die and their families moved back. Several of the young men and women
who once belonged to him came back. Some were so glad to get back they
cried, 'cause fare had been mighty bad part of the time they were rambling
around and they were hungry.” 71

Not every planter welcomed back the freedmen who had left him. If
their departure had been interpreted as betrayal or ingratitude, the former
owners might not wish to see them again; some eagerly anticipated their
ex-slaves begging to return and prepared to turn them off, while still others
expressed a willingness to hire them but would not entrust them with
positions of responsibility. "They'll all be idle before winter,” predicted a
South Carolina "gentleman,” who had apparently lost the bulk of his slave
force. "I don't look for nothing else when cold weather comes but to have
them all asking me to take them back; but I sha'n't do it. I wouldn't give
ten cents apiece for them.” Even if dispossessed planters shared similar
feelings about hiring back their former slaves, most of them could ill afford
such thoughts in regions where labor was scarce. Not only did planters seek
out the blacks who had left them after emancipation but a few went so far
as to try to lure back some able slave who had fled before or during the war.

326

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

If former slaveholders found this a disagreeable and even demeaning task,
many of the freedmen they sought were no less chagrined by the thought
of working on the old places again. No matter how enticing the offer or how
desperate their own situation had become, they might choose to cling
stubbornly to whatever degree of separation from the old way of life they
had managed to attain. With emancipation, Archie Millner’s father, who
had been a slave in Virginia, took his family, crossed the county line, and
fixed up a shanty for them on the edge of the woods. His former master,
who became "hard fixed fo’ someone to work fo’ him,” located the Millner
famil y and pleaded with them to return to the plantation, even offering
them the overseer’s house. "Pa listened to him through but shook his head.
'Reckon I better stay here,’ said pa. Ole man Brown say, 'All right, John,
I see how you feel ’bout it. But it’s all right; I kin make out somehow, an’
if you ever need anything come on over to de place an’ git it.’ But pa never
would go back.” 72

Where the ties between the "white folks” and the slaves had been
fairly close, some of the freedmen returned to the old places but with no
intention of staying. That is, they might choose to pay a social visit, perhaps
to let their former master and mistress know how they were faring in
freedom or to see their old friends who had remained after emancipation.
Several years after leaving her mistress, Mandy Hadnot, a former Texas
slave, still thought of her often "sill ’lone in de big house” and finally
resolved to see her again. "I go to see her and took a peach pie, ’cause I lub
her and I know dat’s what she like better’n anything.” The two women said
the Lord’s Prayer together, as they had often done before, and parted
knowing they would never see each other again. At times, the situation
would be reversed, with former masters and mistresses calling on their
former slaves. Many years after emancipation, Jim Leathers, a North
Carolina planter, decided to visit his old hands, most of whom were concen¬
trated in Dix Hill, near Raleigh. "We had a big supper in his honor,” John
Coggin recalled. Few of them could have imagined how this memorable
reunion would end. "Dat night he died, an’ ’fore he died his min’ sorta
wanders an’ he thinks dat hit am back in de slave days an’ dat atter a long
journey he am cornin’ back home. Hit shore wuz pitiful an’ we shore did
hate it.” 73

If the return of former slaves, whether to stay or to pay a friendly visit,
suggested the durability of the "old ties,” planter families found even more
compelling evidence in the number of blacks who had not moved at all but
continued with their usual tasks in the usual way, seemingly oblivious to
their freedom and the world outside the plantation. Not all the freed slaves
who chose to remain, however, would have shared that view of their deci¬
sion. Whatever the degree of their commitment to the old ties, many of
them perceived all too accurately what lay beyond the boundaries of the
plantation and opted for the relative security of the old place, at least until
they ascertained how compatible this might be with the exercise of their
newly won freedom.

After the shouting and singing had ended, a former Mississippi field
hand recalled of emancipation, "we got to wonderin' 'bout what good it did
us. It didn’ feel no diffrunt; we all loved our marster an' missus an' stayed
on wid 'em jes' lak nothin’ had happened." The same story was related on
numerous farms and plantations in the post-emancipation South. Not only
did many freed slaves remain on the same place but they said "marse" and
"'missus” to the same white folks, worked under the same overseer and
driver, lived in the same quarters, performed the same tasks, and suffered
the same punishments for the same offenses. After agreeing to remain with
his former master for forty cents a day, James Green, a twenty-five-year-
old Texas field hand who had been sold from his Virginia home some
thirteen years before, perceived "no big change” on the plantation. "De
same houses and some got whipped but nobody got nailed to a tree by de
ears, like dey used to." But to Levi Pollard, a former Virginia slave, who
also remained on the same place, the few changes he did discern made a
significant difference. "Us live in de same fine house en do the same kinda
work, but us git real money fer hit, a hundred dollars a year. Den, us wuz
us own boss, en could [come] en go like us any white, jus' so's us put in time
dat us wuz paid fa. En on top er dat, us could have crops, en a garden 'round
de house." 74

Whether to justify the confidence placed in them or from consider¬
ations of age, infirmity, or self-interest, some freedmen never seem to have
entertained the thought of leaving the farms and plantations on which
they had labored as slaves. In their minds, as in their day-to-day lives, the
terms "our white folks" and "our home" had become synonymous, and they
saw no reason to alter a relationship and situation they deemed favorable
to their own best interests. "We was just one fam’ly an' had all we needed,"
explained John Evans, a former North Carolina slave. "We never paid no
'tention to freedom or not freedom." The recollections of former slaves who
remained on the same places after emancipation repeated the same
themes. This was their home, "these were our folks," this was the only kind
of life they had known, their relatives and friends were here, and to aban¬
don the known and the familiar for uncertainty and danger seemed both
foolish and irresponsible. The day of emancipation, Ed McCree remem¬
bered, was "a happy day" on the plantation, but he remained there with
his parents for more than a year and thought he understood the reason. "If
us had left, it would have been jus' lak swappin' places from de fryin' pan
to de fire, 'cause Niggers didn't have no money to buy no land wid for a long
time atter de war." 75

For some freed slaves, however, to remain on the same plantations was
neither an easy nor a popular decision. Not only might they find them¬
selves isolated from their fellow blacks who had left but they could be

328

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

subjected to criticism and harassment if the departure of the others had
been designed to protest the cruelty of the master or to press him into more
favorable contractual terms. Her decision to remain with the same master,
Adeline Blakely recalled, placed her in "a wrong attitude” with local
blacks, most of whom had not shared her "happy” days in the Big House.
"I was pointed out as different. Sometimes I was threatened for not leav¬
ing.” But she endured the name-calling and harassment to stay with the
white folks she thought of as "my people.” If remaining with a former
owner subjected some ex-slaves to the hostility of their fellow blacks, the
decision to leave, as many freedmen discovered, exposed them to the vio¬
lence of hostile whites. In choosing to stay on the same place, black families
expected from their former master the same protection from gangs of
roving whites that he had provided them from the patrollers. Her old
master had little money after emancipation, Virginia Bell recalled, and
"things was mighty hard for a while,” but those who stayed with him
"wasn’ as bad off as some, ’cause white folks knew we was Massa Lewis’
folks and didn’ bother us none.” 76

Not all the freedmen who remained with their previous owners felt the
same degree of attachment or sense of obligation. But no matter how they
viewed the old ties, they were all likely to agree on the absence of realistic
alternatives. After assessing their chances elsewhere, even some of the
more independent-minded freed slaves might opt for certainties and sur¬
vival. To dwell too long on other possibilities seemed like an exercise in
futility. "Us had no education, no land, no mule, no cow, not a pig, nor a
chicken, to set up house keeping,” Violet Guntharpe recalled. "De birds
had nests in de air, de foxes had holes in de ground, and de fishes had beds
under de great falls, but us colored folks was left widout any place to lay
our heads.” 77 The decision to stay on the same plantation was never an
accurate measure of fidelity nor did it necessarily stem from ignorance or
an innate docility. But it could serve as a reliable measurement of disillu¬
sionment with "freedom.”

De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of
dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not eat, wear, and sleep
in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’, ’less you is got
somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin’ on liberty is lak
young folks livin’ on love after they gits married. It just don’t work. No,
sir, it las’ so long and not a bit longer. Don’t tell me! It sho’ don’t hold
good when you has to work, or when you gits hongry.

Some years after the death of his master, this former slave finally achieved
his ambition of farming on his own—and that made all the difference. "If
a poor man wants to enjoy a little freedom, let him go on de farm and work
for hisself. It is sho’ worth somethin’ to be boss, and on de farm you can
be boss all you want to.” 78

Although postwar hardships in the South affected both races, blacks

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

329

were sufficiently realistic to recognize that the brunt of the suffering would
be borne by those without any land or means of support. Jane Johnson, a
former South Carolina slave, voiced the sentiments of thousands of freed-
men and freedwomen when she recalled the "hard times” after the war as
"de worse kind of slavery.” 79 If nothing else, then, the old plantation still
symbolized for some ex-slaves a minimal but fairly reliable source of daily
sustenance, and that kind of security could easily outweigh other consider¬
ations. Regardless of the harshness or benevolence of the former master,
if he appeared to be reasonably solvent and provided his blacks with their
immediate needs, that might be reason enough to stay with him, at least
for a time. Cecelia Chappel, a former Tennessee slave, had little reason to
feel any affection for her master and mistress (they had whipped her often
and she still had the scars to prove it), but she remained with them for a
number of years after emancipation. Despite their uneven temperament,
she would recall, "I alius had good clothes en good food en I didn’ know how
I’d git dem atter I lef.” Nor did Daniel Lucas, who had worked for a
reputedly harsh master and overseer, choose to join the other slaves on the
plantation who quickly scattered after emancipation. "He pays me ten
dollars every month, gives me board and my sleeping place just like always,
and when I gets sick there he is with the herb medicine for my ailment and
I is well again.” Like many former slaves who stayed, he finally left the
plantation only when he married. 80

What the freedmen saw and heard of those who left immediately after
emancipation tended to reinforce the decision many had made to stay
where they were. The stragglers who came begging for food, the sight of
wagons loaded with the coffins of cholera and smallpox victims, the reports
of new murders and drownings, and the stories of migrants subsisting on
cornmeal mush, salt water, and pickled horsemeat, using the marrow from
discarded bones to season their greens, served as daily reminders of the
perils and uncertainty that lay down the road. "What I care ’bout free¬
dom?” asked Charlie Davenport, as he reminisced about the Mississippi
plantation where he remained after the war, even though his father had
run off with the Yankees. "Folks what was free was in misery firs’ one way
an’ den de other.” Like many slaves on the plantation, he had responded
with enthusiasm at the first news of freedom.

I was right smart bit by de freedom bug for awhile. It sounded pow’ful
nice to be tol’: "You don’t have to chop cotton no more. You can th’ow
dat hoe down an* go fishin’ whensoever de notion strikes you. An’ you can
roam ’roun’ at night an’ court gals jus’ as you please. Aint no marster
gwine a-say to you, 'Charlie, you’s got to be back when de clock strikes
nine.’ ” I was fool ’nought to b’lieve all dat kin’ o’ stuff.

But he quickly revised his expectations about freedom, and the example of
those who had gone elsewhere influenced his thinking. "Dem what lef de
old plantation seemed so all fired glad to git back dat I made up my min’

330

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

to stay put. I stayed right wid my white folks as long as I could.” Besides,
he recalled with pride, his master would have been helpless without him. 81

The ironic twists of these years exceeded the most vivid of imagina¬
tions. The same class that took such pride in how it looked after old and
decrepit slaves would now behold the spectacle of former slaves caring for
and refusing to abandon old and decrepit whites who had only recently
been their masters and mistresses. Even as white families wrestled with
the problem of what to do about their aged blacks after emancipation,
man y freed slaves were torn between their desire to make a new start and
the obligations they still felt toward masters and mistresses unable to look
after themselves. "Marster was too old to wuk when dey sot us free,” Nicey
Kinney recalled, "so for a long time us jus’ stayed dar and run his place
for him.” Similarly, Charlie Davenport, upon learning of his freedom, ap¬
preciated the dependency of the "white folks” on his labor. "When I looked
at my marster an’ knowed he needed me, I pleased to stay. Where the
master had been killed in the war, leaving his wife in charge of the planta¬
tion, many freed slaves thought it would be heartless and a betrayal of
mutual trust to abandon her at this critical time. "Mist’ess, she jus’ cried
and cried,” Elisha Doc Garey recalled of the death of his master. "She
didn’t want us to leave her, so us stayed on wid her a long time. 8 Even
if the necessary compassion for a widowed proprietress might be lacking,
some freedmen sensed that they were in an advantageous bargaining posi¬
tion and decided to stay, at least until they saw how the new arrangement
worked out.

Not only did many freed slaves remain to help their "white folks”
through the first difficult postwar years but some apparently felt that only
the death of their old master and mistress could truly break the relation¬
ship. Typical in this respect was Simon Walker, one of the more than one
hundred slaves belonging to Hugh Walker, an Alabama planter. The war
brought hard times to the plantation; the Yankees pillaged the place thor¬
oughly and the master’s son returned from military service with only one
leg. On the day Walker freed his slaves, he asked those willing to remain
to raise their hands, and nearly all of them did so. "Mos’ all de hans stayed
on de plantation ’tell de Cun’l died, and de fambly sorter broke up. Dat wuz
fo’ yeahs atter de Surrender.” Ellen Betts and her mother, Charity, also
remained with "old Marse” until his death. And when the end came, he
insisted upon seeing Ellen’s mother. "He won’t die till ma gits there. Dey
fotch ma from de cane patch and she hold Marse’s hand till he die.” Even
after the death of the master and mistress, some former slaves continued
to serve the family. When "young Master” took over the farm, William
Curtis, a former Georgia slave recalled, that was all the more reason why
he had to stay. "He couldn’t a’done nothing without us niggers. He didn’t
know how to work.” 83

No matter how eloquently former slaveholders praised the fidelity of
those who remained, thinking the old ties had survived still another disrup¬
tive challenge, the most faithful often turned out to be the elderly, the

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

331

infirm, and the very young, those who felt least compelled to uproot them¬
selves. Although many of the older slaves embraced emancipation, for their
children and grandchildren if not for themselves, some thought it too late
to aspire to anything beyond the security afforded by the master and
mistress. While the former master might feel obliged to retain and look
after these people, he also recognized how little labor was left in them. "My
crowd of darkies is rapidly decreasing,” a South Carolina lawyer and politi¬
cian informed his brother. "Almost two weeks ago, my cook departed with
her child. Last week, our house girl left, and this morning, another girl,
lately employed in the culinary department, vacated. We still have six big
and little—one old, three children, one man sick, so that you may perceive
there are mouths and backs enough, but the labor is very deficient.” Antici¬
pating future losses, Emma Holmes thought in May 1865 that every ser¬
vant would leave except for Ann, "who is lame, solitary, very dull, slow,
timid and friendless.” In some instances, the few remaining slaves shared
the dismay of their "white folks” over the departures, but for altogether
different reasons. "I was de only nigger left on de place,” recalled Esther
Green, who was ten years old at the time. "I jus’ cried and cried, mostly
because I was jus’ lonesome for some of my own kind to laugh and talk
wid.” 84

To remain might be less of a commitment to the old place and the old
ties than a necessary holding action, until the confusion surrounding
emancipation had been clarified. After being informed of his freedom,
Robert Glenn, a young Kentucky black, agreed to remain on the same
plantation. But he spent much of his time, as he recalled, considering a
different kind of life for himself. "I took my freedom by degrees and re¬
mained obedient and respectful, but still wondering and thinking of what
the future held for me. After I retired at night I made plan after plan and
built aircastles as to what I would do.” Nearly a year later, having failed
to heed the first work call, he found himself awakened one morning by the
foreman’s slap across the head. Glenn went about his usual tasks that day,
feeding the stock and cutting firewood. His employer then ordered him to
hitch a team of horses to a wagon and proceed to a neighboring farm where
he was to pick up a load of hogs. Perhaps Glenn himself could not have
anticipated his response. He refUsed to carry out the command. "They
called me into the house and asked me what I was going to do about it. I
said I do not know. As I said that I stepped out of the door and left.” He
never returned.**

With sufficient time, freedmen like Robert Glenn gained additional
confidence in themselves, learned more about the opportunities made pos¬
sible by their freedom, and determined to take their chances elsewhere.
After spending the first year on the plantation or farm of their bondage,
scores of blacks in every section of the South chose to leave. Even larger
numbers, however, began to stake out a greater degree of autonomy for
themselves without moving at all. The more perceptive white families
could discern the changes in those who had remained, often quite gradual

332

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

and subtle but no less threatening and disconcerting. "Henney is still with
me,” a South Carolina woman informed her niece, "but not the same
person that she was.” 86

Postscript: Four Letters

Whether or not the freed slave and the former owner ever met again
after emancipation, each of them retained his or her own memories of the
old times and places and the quality of the "old ties” that had bound them
together. For generations, members of slaveholding families and their de¬
scendants would regale the reading public with period pieces and reminis¬
cences in which their "black folk” figured conspicuously, most often
appearing as the authors had always wished to perceive them. Unfortu¬
nately, few former slaves kept any written records of their thoughts during
the critical juncture of their lives when they became free men and women.
But the "old ties” occasionally yielded a letter written by a former slave
to those who had once owned their bodies (though never wholly their
minds); in some instances, the communications were barely legible or had
been dictated to a friend, a teacher, or a clergyman. But if the black
correspondents were at times illiterate, they seldom suffered from inarticu¬
lateness. Reflecting the experiences of the nearly four million black people
who had endured bondage, the authors of these four letters revealed a wide
range of emotions and perceptions about slavery, freedom, and the quality
and endurance of the old relationships, and these in turn were profoundly
influenced in each case by the fate of their post-emancipation expectations
and aspirations.

Liberty, Va. July 10th/1865

Master Man,

I have the honor to appeal to you one more for assistance, Master. I am
cramped hear nearly to death and no one ceares for me heare, and I want
you if you pleas Sir, to Send for me. I dont care if I am free. I had rather
live with you. I was as free while with you, as I wanted to be. Mas. Man
you know I was as well Satisfied with you as I wanted to be. Now Affec¬
tionate Master pleas, oh, pleas come or Sind for me. John is still hired
out at the Same and doing Well and well Satisfied only greaving about
home, he want to go home as bad as I do, if you ever Send for me I will
Send for him immediately, and take him home to his kind Master. Mas,
Man. pleas to give my love to all of my friends, and especialy to my young
mistress dont forget to reserve a double portion for yourself. I Will close
at present, hoping to bee at your Service Soon yes before yonders Sun
Shal rise and Set any more.

May I Subscribe myself your Most affectionate humble friend and
Servt.

Isabella A. Soustan 87

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

333

Montgomery, February 10, 1867

My Dear Old Master,—I am anxious to see you and my young masters
and mistresses. I often think of you, and remember with pleasure how
kind you all ever were to me. Though freedom has been given to the
colored race, I often sigh for the good old days of slave-times, when we

were all so happy and contented-I am tolerably pleasantly situated.

I am hired to a Mr. Sanderson, who treats me very well. I am very well,
and hope I may have an opportunity of coming to see you all next Christ¬
mas. I am still single and don’t think much about beaux. I don’t think the
men in these days of freedom are of much account. If I could find one
whom I think a real good man, and who would take good care of me, I
would get married. Please, dear old master, ask some of my young mis¬
tresses to write to me.

My kind and respectful remembrances to all.

Your former servant and friend,
Alice Dabney 88

February 5, 1867

Mas William

I guess you will be somewhat surprised to receive a letter from me. I
am well & doing just as well as I could expect under the circumstances,
one blessing is I have plenty to eat & have plenty of work to do, & get
tolerable fair prices for my work. I have but two children, they are good
size boys, able to plough & help me out a great deal. I still work at my
trade. I once thought I wanted to come back to that old country, but I
believe I have given up that notion. Give my best respects to old Mas
Henry & his family Miss Jane & all the family.

Tell Austin howdy for me & tell him I want him to write to me & give
me all the news of that old country who has married who has died give
me all the news I am anxious to hear from them all tell Austin to give
them all my love to all I havent time to mention all ther names, but I wish
to hear from all remember me to Coleman especialy. As I am in a great
hurry I will close please send me word, direct your letter to Camden in
the Case or in the name of S. B. Griffin, Camden, Washita County, Arksas.

I remains as ever Respt

Your humble Servant

Jake 89

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P. H. Anderson,

Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jour-
don, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again,
promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt

334

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long
before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they
never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier
that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me
twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am
glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old
home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther,
Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will
meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you
all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors
told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give
me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and
clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs.
Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and
are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher.
They go to Sunday-School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly.
We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them
colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt
when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in
Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been
proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say
what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it
would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be
gained on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the Provost-
Marshal-General of the Department at Nashville. Mandy says she would
be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed
to treat us justly and kindly—and we have concluded to test your sincer¬
ity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This
will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and
friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and
Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy,
our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the
time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our
clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy,
and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send
the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio.
If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith
in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your
eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my
fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense.
Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was
never any pay day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows.
Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer
of his hire.

In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for
my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls.
You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather
stay here and starve and die if it comes to that than have my girls brought

The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

335

to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will
also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored
children in your neighborhood, the great desire of my life now is to give
my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

P.S.—Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol
from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson 90

Few individuals—white or black—have ever articulated the meaning
of freedom more clearly or more precisely than Jourdon Anderson. How
many such people came out of slavery remains difficult to determine. But
as former slaveholders assumed the role of employers and prepared to deal
with the freed slaves as workers, they sometimes found their plantations
and farms overrun with men and women who evinced the same spirit and
the same determination to work under conditions that would in no way
compromise their newly won freedom. What happened to that spirit and
to that determination would profoundly affect race relations and the na¬
tion for more than a century.

Chapter Seven

BACK TO WORK:

THE OLD COMPULSIONS

We have been faithful in the field up to the present time , and think that
we ought to be considered as men, and allowed a fair chance in the race
of life. It has been said that a black man can not make his own living;
but give us opportunities and we will show the whites that we will not
come to them for any thing ; if they do not come to us. We think the
colored people have been the making of them, and can make something
of ourselves in time. The colored people know how to work, and the
whites have been dependent upon them. They can work again, and will
work. A white man may talk very well, but put him to work, and what
will he say? He will say that hard work is not easy. He will say that it
is hard for a man who has owned so many able-bodied negroes to have
the Yankees come and take them all away.

—CORPORAL JACKSON CHERRY, COMPANY I, 35TH REGIMENT, UNITED
STATES COLORED TROOPS, DECEMBER 16, 1865 1

0 1 ld Letitia is with me still on the old terms and declines to make any
change in consequence of her freedom,” William L. DeRosset, a for¬
mer North Carolina slaveholder, informed his brother. "I can see no differ¬
ence in her at all, and I notified her when I first saw the order freeing them,
that she was at liberty to go, but that if she staid with me it must be as she
had before & if she misbehaved I would not hesitate to flog her. She acqui¬
esced fully & I have had no trouble.” With several of the other servants,
however, he had been less successful. "Susie became impudent & I drove
her off,” while Louisa "wanted to make a change” and left. To replace
them, he managed to hire "two of the best servants I ever saw, both young
mulatto women, & real niggers.” Having already surrendered the use of his
right leg, the still unrepentant DeRosset remained willing to sacrifice his
right arm if it would help to ensure the ultimate triumph of the Lost Cause.
With blacks in his region abandoning the rice fields for more desirable
labor, he recognized that unwelcome changes lay ahead. But DeRosset
remained confident of the outcome and he would manage his laborers in
that spirit. "The Negroes over the entire South are beginning to awaken
to a sense of their still dependant position towards the whites and conse-

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

337

quently are much more respectful and steadily improving in this respect.
So that in a few years I think every thing will be about as it was except
that we can not control their entire time.” 2

To listen to the former slaveholder, emancipation had changed only
the method of compensation, not the basic arrangement, not the mutual
understanding that had underlain the old system. If he continued to meet
his obligations to his freed blacks and provide for their daily needs, if he
agreed to pay them in some way for their labor (whether by wages or
shares), he expected them to maintain the old demeanor and to comply
with his expectations, regulations, and demands. "My own servants on the
lot have not said a word about wages nor changed at all in their deportment
or duty,” a Florida farmer and physician advised his cousin in North
Carolina. The one problem he had encountered was a former slave who
"was very idle & a little impertinent to my wife,” but he resolved the
matter quickly and in a familiar fashion. "I gave her a moderate thrashing
a few days ago and we have had no more trouble yet.” That same remedy,
when coupled with the traditional reliance on mutual obligations, provided
a Mississippi planter with all the security he needed to continue his agri¬
cultural operations. "We go right on like we always did,” he explained,
"and I pole ’em if they don’t do right. This year I says to em, "Boys, I’m going
to make a bargain with you. I’ll roll out the ploughs and the mules and the
feed, and you shall do the work; we’ll make a crop of cotton, and you shall
have half. I’ll provide for ye, give ye quarters, treat ye well, and when ye
won’t work, pole ye like I always have.’ They agreed to it, and I put it into
the contract that I was to whoop ’em when I pleased.” 3

Even as Henry W. Ravenel argued that both whites and blacks now
needed to unlearn the old relationship, he had nothing drastic in mind. He
insisted that the freed blacks were to show ""deference, respect & attach¬
ment,” while their former masters, in return, would exercise ""kindliness,
care, & attention.” But there was little question as to where the ultimate
authority lay. Like most planters, William Henry Stiles of Georgia pre¬
pared to manage his working force much as he had in the past. If the
blacks were no longer legally bound to him, as he finally and only grudg¬
ingly conceded, neither did he feel obligated to employ them if they proved
troublesome. After reprimanding his newly freed slaves for their inde¬
pendent work habits, such as taking more time off for meals than he
permitted, Stiles advised them that they were perfectly free to leave. But
if they chose to stay, he made clear, ""they should work as they had obli¬
gated themselves to do—that is to work in the same manner as they always
had done.” This kind of advice became commonplace, and the phrase "'to
work in the same manner as they always had done” was often written into
newly devised labor contracts. To many planters, in fact, the principle was
sufficiently important to risk their entire labor force. "Our freedmen will
leave us,” J. B. Moore, an Alabama planter, confided to his diary. "They
will not agree to work and be controlled by me, hence, I told them I would
not hire them.” 4

338

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Whatever the legal status of the freedmen, then, the planter class
made every effort to retain the essential features of the old work discipline.
To tolerate the slightest deviation, no matter how trivial, was to unhinge
the entire network of controls and restraints and thereby undermine the
very basis of the social order as well as the labor system. What most whites
found difficult to accept was not so much the freedom of the slaves as the
determination of the ex-slaves to act as though they were free. "Our
Negroes remain in status quo,” Donald MacRae, a North Carolina commis¬
sion merchant, observed in September 1865, "except that I imagine they
feel a little disposition to show their freedom.” He determined to impress
upon every one of his former slaves that there were restraints on that
freedom. "Yesterday,” he related to his wife, "Zielu—without asking—told
me she was going to church at Cool Spring. She did what work she had to
do ahead, left at daylight, and did not return till after supper. I told her
this morning that though I acknowledge her freedom, I do not acknowledge
her right to do as she wishes without my consent, and that if she tried it
again she should not come back.” He could hardly have been clearer, and
few whites accustomed to the ownership of slaves would have dissented
from his position. Even the most "humane” among them, "conscious of
none but the friendliest and best intentions” toward their blacks, a traveler
in Virginia observed in 1865, insisted on "nothing less than complete defer¬
ence” and resisted "anything resembling independence and self-reliance in
them.... In short, he wishes still to be master, is willing to be a kind
master, but will not be a just employer.” 5

If the former master preferred to view the new relationship within the
old work discipline, the newly freed slaves were apt to have some different
notions about how matters now stood. Although as slaves they had been
subject to the arbitrary powers and caprice of their owners, even then
many of them had managed to establish a line of toleration beyond which
few masters or overseers might wish to move; and as freedmen, they sought
to achieve a sense of personal autonomy while widening the area of maneu¬
verability. No matter how many of them still worked for the same "white
folks” and still depended on white men for support and protection, few
were unaffected by the change in their legal status. Even if the aspiration
of ex-slaves to eradicate the old dependency was but barely realized, the
vast majority of them, according to the testimony of two black leaders in
July 1865, "knew pretty well in what respects their present differed from
their former situation. They all knew they were their own men.” 6

The crucial difference could not be measured by the amount of compen¬
sation they now received but involved a different perception of themselves
and their relationship to whites. The freedmen on the Sneed plantation,
near Austin, Texas, expressed no desire to leave the place on which they
had labored as slaves but they had every intention of moving out of their
slave quarters. On the plantation of Joseph Glover in South Carolina, a
slave named Abraham had served with considerable distinction during the

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

339

war, managing the place in his master’s absence and even berating "the
bad behaviour of some of the people.” With the advent of freedom,
Abraham informed his former master that he neither wished nor intended
to leave but would await his return "to hear what proposal you may make.”
No less ready to assert her new status was a black woman named Rose, who
worked as a servant on a plantation in Louisiana and also performed the
duties of midwife, attending both the slaves and several "white ladies” in
the neighborhood. For assisting the white women, she had been paid ten
dollars each time, half of which her mistress had retained. With freedom,
her new employer promised her the entire ten dollars. "Didn’t you say the
black people are free?” she asked him. When he agreed, she inquired,
"White people are free, too, ain’t they?” When he again replied in the
affirmative, Rose both asked and demanded, "Then why shouldn’t you pay
me ten dollars every time I ’tend upon the black folks on the plantation?”
None of these instances constituted startling or even dramatic manifesta¬
tions of independence, any more than the action of some Alabama slaves
who chose to stay with "massa” but demanded and secured the right to
celebrate each year the anniversary of their freedom. ("Every 19th of June
he would let us clean off a place and fix a platform and have dancing and
eating out there in the field.”) But in each case, if only symbolically, the
freedmen had made their point; they had acted on their freedom, they had
asserted their individual worth, and they had no doubt derived consider¬
able personal satisfaction and pride from doing so. 7

To remain on the same farm or plantation, to work for the old master
or for any white man, was not necessarily to forfeit, postpone, or compro¬
mise their freedom. No matter how each ex-slave chose to express this fact,
many of them insisted that it be understood and acknowledged, even at the
cost of severing the relationship altogether. "Whose servant are you?” the
Reverend John Hamilton Cornish, an Episcopalian minister in Aiken,
South Carolina, demanded to know of his former slave after reprimanding
her for using profane language in his presence. "My own servant,” she
replied. Seeking clarification, he asked her if she intended to remain with
him. "I am willing to live with you as I have always done, & know you will
pay me proper wages,” she replied. Not satisfied with that answer, the
minister insisted, "If you remain with me, you will be my servant, &
conduct yourself accordingly, & will receive just what you have been accus¬
tomed to receive. Nothing more.” If this had been calculated to impress her
with his undiminished authority, the result must have been discouraging.
"I’ll leave then,” she promptly announced. Having stood enough of her
"impertinence,” the clergyman told her to "seek a better place” and to have
her belongings removed by the end of the week. And still to his surprise,
she did precisely that. 8

Whether in the fields or in the house, the most disturbing manifesta¬
tions ofblack freedom were the breakdown of the old discipline, the refusal
to obey orders promptly if at all, and the disinclination to regard "massa”

340

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

and "missus” with the same degree of fear, awe, and respect previously
expected of black subordinates. "My niggers used to do as I told them, but
that time is passed,” a Louisiana planter lamented. The number of black
laborers dismissed for "bad work & insolent language” may have been
limited only by the difficulty in replacing them. Neither the formerly free
Negroes nor the freed slaves, a northern observer wrote, "seem to recognize
any obligations they may be under to employers.” Not only had they "ap¬
propriated” chickens, eggs, milk, and vegetables "to an amount fully equal
to their wages” but any attempt to discipline them proved futile as long as
some neighboring planter was anxious to hire them. Where slaves had
behaved "outrageously” during the war, as on the Louisiana plantation of
Governor Thomas O. Moore, the efforts of local whites to restore the old
discipline met with only partial success. The conduct of black workers on
the Moore place had become so "disobedient, defiant, [and] disrespectful”
that the manager preferred to deal with them through an agent. "I go but
seldom where they are at work,” he confessed. 9

Comparisons of productivity under slave and free labor, a favorite
pastime of postwar commentators of all persuasions, clearly favored the old
system. With near unanimity, the planters themselves testified in the
aftermath of the war that their former slaves did "half their former work”;
the estimates ran both higher and lower but that average tended to pre¬
vail. 10 A Mississippi planter told of a slave who had once picked thirty bales
of cotton in one season but freedom reduced that figure to three bales; on
the other hand, he praised three black families (also his former slaves)
"who from nothing, are worth from $1,000 to $1,500 in money, stock, etc.,
to-day. They yielded to my advice. This number, out of 225 (which I was
relieved of without any effort on my part); the balance are all trash, pau¬
pers, consumers, worse than army worms, and strange to say, they are
quite as intelligent as the prosperous ones; but generally good slaves made
poor freedmen.” 11

To place any considerable weight on these initial assessments of the
productivity of freedmen would be to minimize the ways in which a destruc¬
tive war might have disrupted any kind of labor system. The statistics of
output, moreover, could tell different stories, depending on who collected
them and for what purpose. Abolitionists and Union officials eager to prove
the advantages of free labor were not necessarily more accurate in their
computations than those who looked back with nostalgia to the old days
and the Lost Cause. No doubt productivity declined under freedom, but to
many of the ex-slaves comparative labor efficiency seemed less important
in 1865 than the conditions under which they would work as free men and
women and the rewards they would reap from their labor.

With the scarcity of laborers in many sections of the postwar South,
the former slaves appeared to be in an excellent bargaining position. "The
cry on all sides, is for laborers,” a much-perplexed Mississippi planter
observed, and yet the freedman, "finding himself master of the situation,”

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

341

preferred to use his new power to reduce his labor rather than increase his
compensation. The problem, most observers agreed, lay not so much in the
number of working hours (the ten-hour day, six-day week still prevailed)
as in the inclination of the freedmen to labor less arduously. Even as
patient and systematic a planter as Edward B. Heyward, who prided him¬
self on his unique understanding of the rice-field blacks, almost despaired
of extracting more labor from them.

The work progresses very slowly and they seem perfectly indifferent. Oh!
no one away from "the scene of operations” can have any conception of
the difficulties we have to encounter.... I allude especially to our Rice
field negro, a real gang worker, a perfect machine or part of a machine
rather. He never thinks, never did, perhaps never will. The women ap¬
pear most lazy, merely because they are allowed the opportunity. They
wish to stay in the house or in the garden all the time.... The men are
scarcely much better. They go out, because they are obliged to. They feel
bound as a slave and work under constraint, are impudent, careless and
altogether very provoking.

What most planters suspected and many freedmen readily conceded was
a general and deliberate slowdown—the development of a work pace con¬
sistent with and reflective of their new status as free men and women.
"Their idea of freedom,” a Federal official reported from Bolivar County,
Mississippi, in July 1865, "is that they are under no control; can work when
they please, and go where they wish.” 12

With careful training, and with force if necessary, the planter class
thought it could instill a discipline and attitude in their slaves that would
overcome the blacks’ traditional notions about work and time. But to listen
to the former masters in the aftermath of the war, that discipline came
unhinged the moment their blacks began to act on their freedom. "Negroes
know nothing of the value of time,” a Texas planter proclaimed, and on
countless farms and plantations that seemed to translate into less work
and lost days, with laborers reporting to the fields late, remaining out
longer at mealtime, and refusing to labor on Saturday afternoons. 13 Pierce
Butler, the large Georgia rice planter, wondered how he could possibly
make a crop when most of his hands left the fields in the early afternoon,
even at the busiest time of the season. When his daughter returned to the
plantation after the war to assist him, she shared his exasperation, particu¬
larly in view of the loyalty the blacks had shown him as slaves.

The negroes talked a great deal about their desire and intention to work
for us, but their idea of work, unaided by the stern law of necessity, is
very vague, some of them working only half a day and some even less.

I don’t think one does a really honest full day’s work, and so of course
not half the necessary amount is done and I am afraid never will be
again.... I generally found that if I wanted a thing done I first had to
tell the negroes to do it, then show them how, and finally do it myself.

342

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Their way of managing not to do it was very ingenious, for they always
were perfectly good-tempered, and received my orders with, "Dat’s so,
missus; just as missus says,” and then always somehow or other left the
thing undone. 14

Few planters appeared to comprehend fully why this was happening,
only that their experiences confirmed what they had long suspected—that
black slaves were productive laborers while free blacks were not. After
thirty-seven years devoted to raising sugarcane and cotton, a Louisiana
planter found himself unable to induce his seventy-five blacks, almost all
of them his former slaves, to produce even a fraction of the prewar crops.
Not only did they work slowly but they took no interest in maintaining the
plantation fences ("all rotting down”) or buildings ("decaying and going to
min ”). It was as though they no longer cared. "Wherever you look the eye
rests on nothing but the relics of former things fast passing to destruction.”
Neither "moral suasion” nor wage incentives had induced them to work
harder. "The nature of the negro cannot be changed by the offer of more
or less money,” he concluded, repeating the familiar excuse of employers
everywhere, "all he [the Negro] desires is to eat, drink and sleep, and
perform the least possible amount of labor.” But even if the ultimate
responsibility lay with racial characteristics, that made the experience no
less wrenching, the humiliations endured no less trying. "I have the heart¬
break over things,” one disillusioned planter wrote. "I see this big planta¬
tion, once so beautifully kept up, going to rack and ruin. I see the negroes
I trained so carefully deteriorating every day. We suffer from theft, are

humiliated by impertinence; and cannot help ourselves-This is the first

rule in their lesson of freedom—to get all they can out of white folks and
give as little as possible in return.” 15

Where planters, overseers, and managers failed to induce the blacks
to maintain the old pace of labor, the black drivers fared little better,
provided they were tolerated at all. On a Louisiana sugar plantation, Jim
had long held the position of driver, and he was proud of the way he had
exercised his duties—no prouder than his master, who thought him the
most intelligent and skillful slave he had ever known. After the war,
however, Jim found his people unresponsive to his demands, and he could
only shake his head in disbelief:

I sposed, now we’s all free, dey’d jump into de work keen, to make all de
money dey could. But it was juss no work at all. I got so ’scouraged
sometimes I’s ready to gib it all up, and tell ’em to starve if dey wanted
to. Why, sah, after I’d ring de bell in the momin’ ’twould be hour, or hour
’n half ’fore a man’d get into de fiel’. Den dey’d work along maybe an
hour, maybe half hour more; and den dey’d say, "Jim, aint it time to
quit?” I say, "No, you lazy dog, taint ten o’clock.” Den dey’d say, "Jim,
I’s mighty tired,” and next thing I’d know, dey’d be pokin’ off to de
quarters. When I scold and swear at ’em, dey say, "We’s free now, and

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

343

we’s not work unless we pleases.” Sah, I got so sick of deir wuflessness
dat I sometimes almost wished it was old slavery times again.

That was the driver’s view of how matters stood; the remaining field hands,
however, thought him a hard taskmaster—"harder on them than white
folks.” Few of them, moreover, expected to contract for a new year unless
they were accorded certain privileges, like their own tracts of land to
cultivate for their own benefit. Nevertheless, the driver expected that in
time these freedmen would come to their senses, particularly with a white
overseer now on the premises. "Dey wants a white man to gib orders,” he
explained. "Dey wouldn’t min’ me las’ yeah, ’cause I’s nigger like dem-
selves. I tink dey do better dis yeah.” 16

Although the rate of "desertion” appears to have been lower in the
fields than in the households, few planters could assume in mid-1865 that
any of their hands would be on the same plantation at the end of the year.
Within a period of five months, the Beaver Bend plantation, a once flourish¬
ing enterprise, was brought to a point of virtual ruin. Before the war, Hugh
Davis had reaped substantial profits out of his 5,000 acres of rich Black Belt
land; in 1862, he died of an apoplectic stroke, and an administrator and
overseer managed the plantation while Hugh Davis, Jr., eighteen years old
when the war broke out, served in the Confederate Army. After the war,
Davis found that the slaves in this region had "all become monomaniacs
on the subject of freedom,” thousands of them flocking to Selma "to be free”
and "to embrace the nigger lovers, ” only to discover Yankee freedom to be
a "delusion” and to hasten back to the old plantation. Of the seventy-eight
Davis slaves, some thirteen men and thirteen women were persuaded to
remain and contract to work "as they have heretofore done” for provisions
and a share (one fifth) of the crop. Within several weeks after Davis’ return
to the plantation, continual movement and malingering among the former
slaves seriously interfered with the completion of the crop. "Negroes will
not work for pay, the lash is all I fear that will make them,” he wrote on
May 30, 1865. Five weeks later, the same problems plagued him, with
seventeen of his "best hands” having left for Selma. The Davis plantation,
like so many others, experienced a turbulent period in which freedmen—
both the old hands and the newly hired workers—came and departed with
an exasperating regularity. After sustaining still further losses, the young
planter finally threw up his hands in disgust and left the plantation to take
up residence in nearby Marion, where he remained the rest of his life. On
October 3, 1865, some five months after his return from military service,
Davis made his final journal entry as a prospective postwar planter: "Fare¬
well Old Farm Book! to record the future work of free negroes beside your
content would disgrace the past. The work and profits of the best labor
system ever established have been written on these pages—the past was
brilliant but the future is dismal, gloomy.” 17

With undisguised smugness (as if they had anticipated precisely this
outcome), punctuated with proper expressions of alarm, outrage, and exas-

344

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

peration, occasionally tempered with a degree of commiseration, the dis¬
possessed slaveholding class observed the fatal effects of emancipation on
the Negro character and the plantation economy. Everywhere he went in
the South, a northern journalist reported, people talked about little else.
"Let conversation begin where it will, it ends with Sambo.” Expecting the
worst, the white South prepared to believe almost anything, and with few
exceptions it heard only an accumulation of irritations, grievances, and
horror tales. The incidents and themes kept repeating themselves, resting
as they did on long-held assumptions about the character and limited
capacity of the African race. Released from the care and discipline of the
master, "no longer stimulated by the 'Must!’,” the freedman by his behav¬
ior revealed how necessary that bondage had been. He refused to work,
preferring a life of idleness, dissipation, and vagrancy; and even when he
worked, "what is done is badly done.” He entertained extravagant notions
about his freedom—"idleness, plenty of good food and fine clothes,” not to
mention that imminent forty acres and a mule. His natural inclination to
theft manifested itself even more blatantly in freedom. Tm sure they were
all thieves in Africa. Wherever you read about them they’re always the
same.” Freed from all restraint, he had become "fearfully licentious,”
"saucy and rude,” "insubordinate and insolent,” "lazy, thieving, lying,
ignorant, brutish,” "shiftless, improvident, idle,” "skulking, shuffling, and
worthless,” and "an unmitigated nuisance.” After all that had been done
for him, he evinced "not as much gratitude ... as many of the inferior
animals.” Although his legal status had been altered, his basic character
remained the same, and that only invited future troubles. "Thar ain’t no
good side to ’em,” an old South Carolina planter explained. "You can’t find
a white streak in ’em, if you turn ’em wrong side outwards and back

again_All the men are thieves, and all the women are prostitutes. It’s

their natur’ to be that way, and they never’ll be no other way. They ain’t
worth the land they cover.” 18

If planters suspected their blacks of deliberately slowing the pace of
labor, few of them cared to deal with the more obvious implications of such
a move. Rather, they preferred to assign responsibility not only to peculiar
racial characteristics but to lax discipline, Federal interference, and, per¬
haps most critically, a rising generation of blacks who had not been incul¬
cated with a proper regard for time, industry, and the Protestant work
ethic. "The old hands are passing away,” a Texas planter lamented. "The
young ones do not learn to work. No authority is exercised by parents to
teach them to work or understand the value of time, industry and econ¬
omy.” Under present conditions, an Arkansas planter concurred, the num¬
ber of blacks "trained from childhood to hard labor” was rapidly
diminishing and the new generation was therefore bound to be "worth¬
less.” The same considerations prompted an Alabama planter to rely on his
"old, trained hands” to make a crop. "Such as were once considered second-
rate,” he observed, "are now the best.” Actually, these were simply varia¬
tions on what had become a popular postwar theme among whites—that

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

345

unless blacks were properly controlled and trained, the African race under
conditions of freedom would revert back to barbarism. 19

But if whites quickly interpreted the work habits of their former slaves
as conclusive proof of racial degeneration, the newly freed black workers
chose to view their introduction to free labor quite differently. What many
planters defined as a slowdown was often the freedmen's refusal to work
up to their previous exploitative level. And what many planters viewed as
an unwillingness to work and rebellious behavior proved in some instances
to be nothing more than a well-earned, albeit brief respite from the rigor¬
ous plantation routines that had characterized the freedmen's previous
lives. "No rest, massa, all work, all de time; plenty to eat, but no rest, no
repose/ 5 was the way an elderly South Carolina freedman described his life
as a slave; he was much happier now, he added, if only for the "chance for
[a] little comfort.” How could the planter class, moreover, deny to their
former slaves a privilege they had flaunted so often in their presence? If
there were "lazy” and "improvident” freedmen, a black clergyman de¬
clared, they were simply modeling themselves after the masters and mis¬
tresses they had observed for so many years. "They never worked for their
own living,” he said of the planters, "and hence their slaves imitate their
former owners. Who is to blame?” Slavery itself, another observer noted,
had taught that a gentleman was a person who lived without working. "Is
it wonderful,” he then asked, "that some of the negroes, who want now to
be gentlemen, should have thought of trying this as the easiest way?” 20

Even if few ex-slaves had the wherewithal to aspire to be "gentlemen,”
they did have certain strong convictions about the perquisites of their new
status. What was freedom all about if not the chance to work less than they
had as slaves and to have more leisure time for themselves, their families,
and their garden plots? As one freedwoman in South Carolina remarked,
she had not yet experienced any freedom, for she was working just as hard
as ever. When pressed to work harder, a Georgia freedman "indignantly”
inquired of his new employer, who happened to be a Northerner, "what the
use of being free was, if he had to work harder than when he was a slave.”
More often than not, the slowdown was a way for newly freed black men
and women to dramatize to themselves the distinction between their for¬
mer and present positions—to know "de feel of bein' free.” The inclination
to work at their own pace also reflected for many ex-slaves the limited
possibilities for achievement as landless agricultural laborers—if freedom
could not mean "getting ahead,” it could at the very least mean not work¬
ing hard. 21

While planters preferred to compare how many bales of cotton were
produced under slavery and under freedom, their former slaves searched
for ways to break away from a dependency and a day-to-day routine that
seemed all too familiar. "Missus done keep me in slave times totin' milk,
an’ pickin’ cotton, an' now de black 'uns is free, ... 'pears like we hev tu
tote all de milk, an' pick de cotton, an' work jes' de same.” 22 Within the
closer confinement and supervision of the households, where it proved

346

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

difficult for blacks to reconcile their new freedom with the demands of
domestic service, the quest for personal autonomy and individual worth
often took on an even greater urgency than in the fields.

After the war, Charles and Etta Stearns, both of them "uncompromis¬
ing” abolitionists, came to the South, where they acquired ownership of a
plantation in Columbia County, Georgia. The name they gave to their
place, "Hope On Hope Ever Plantation,” signified their optimism about the
transition to free black labor. Within days after their arrival, Etta began
to reorder the household. That was when the trouble began. Margaret, the
cook, was a woman of considerable independence and sensitivity, out¬
spoken on behalf of her rights and prerogatives, and determined that no
person should infringe upon them without her consent. It required only a
minor incident—an order to wash the dishes in a different way—to bring
to the surface her feelings about the new arrangements and her new mis¬
tress. Planting herself in the middle of the room, facing Etta Stearns,
Margaret made it clear that she was "gwine to be cook ob dis ere house,
and Ise want no white woman to trouble me. You white folks spose, cause
you white, and we all black, that us dunno noffin, and you knows ebery-
ting.” Removing her yellow turban from her head, and waving it in her
Viands J she declared in a voice loud enough to reach the more than attentive
black laborers outside:

Now missus, youse one bery good white woman, come down from de great
Nccth, to teach poor we to read, and sich as that; but we done claned
dishes all our days, long before ye Yankees heard tell of us, and now does
ye suppose I gwine to give up all my rights to ye, just cause youse a
Yankee white woman? Does ye know missus that we’s free now? Yas, free
we is, and us ant gwine to get down to ye, any more than to them ar rebs.

Upon hearing "this harangue,” the overseer rushed in, seized Margaret by
the neck of her dress, and dragged her out unceremoniously, while exclaim¬
ing, "Shut up, you damn black wench, or I’ll beat your brains out.” Turning
to his employers, he remarked, “Never mind her, Mrs. Steams; these nig¬
gers have no more sense or maimers than a mule; but I’ll teach her not to
insult white people.” When Margaret subsequently returned to the house,
she was "mild as a lamb” and washed the dishes as ordered but when told
the next day to clean the cupboards, rebellion flared again. "Black folks
don’t work on Sunday,” she announced. Etta Steams cleaned the cup¬
boards. 23

The refusal to take any more "foolishment off of white folks” (native
whites and Yankees alike) reflected the determination of many freedmen

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

347

and freedwomen to stake out a larger degree of personal autonomy for
themselves. Families accustomed to servants and absolute obedience often
had to look no further than to their own households to Observe the strange,
ominous, sometimes shocking manifestations of black freedom. How was
any family to know when a long-time black faithful had reached the break¬
ing point, and as a free person no longer felt obliged to contain the rage
and resentment within her? "You betta do it yourself,” a Charleston ser¬
vant suddenly told her mistress after being ordered to scour some pots and
kettles. "Ain’t you smarter an me? You think you is—Wy you no scour fo
you-self.” On the Pine Hill plantation in Leon County, Florida, Emeline
had served as the cook for many years; the white family thought of her as
"a great pet,” a favorite of the children, and a faithful worker. On May 20,
1865, around dinnertime, the mistress’s daughter searched for Emeline
("who has always professed to love me dearly”) in her accustomed place in
the kitchen but failed to find her. Hastening to Emeline’s house, she found
her dressed in her best Sunday clothes, preparing to attend an emancipa¬
tion picnic sponsored by three regiments of black soldiers stationed nearby.
When reminded of her kitchen obligations and the expected guests for
dinner, the long-time servant retorted, "Take dem [storeroom and pantry]
keys back ter yer Mother an’ tell her I don’t never ’spects ter cook no more,
not while I lives—tell her I’se free, bless de Lord! Tell her if she want any
dinner she kin cook it herself.” Admittedly "hurt and dazed” by this en¬
counter, the white woman left silently. "They are free, I thought; free to
do as they please. Never before had I had a word of impudence from any
of our black folks but they are not ours any longer.... I have learned a
lesson today; we must not expect too much of 'free negroes.’ ” 24

Although such outbursts from servants were rare, many white fami¬
lies might have preferred them to the more subtle transformation by which
their once faithful domestics became unrecognizable men and women. Af¬
ter five months with his freed slaves, a Georgia planter found them "obvi¬
ously changing in character every day.” Even Frances Butler Leigh, who
had been so impressed with the devotion of her father’s slaves, wondered
if she had been premature in her judgment. Visiting the plantation on St.
Simon’s Island, she found her household staff reduced both in numbers and
in the quality of their service: Alex "invariably is taken ill just as he ought
to get dinner,” while Pierce "since his winter at the North is too fine to do
anything but wait at table. So I cook, and my maid does the housework..
Emma Holmes, on the other hand, described in admiring detail the faithful
service rendered by "the few who remain with us,” including a servant who
still asked permission to leave the premises and apologized profusely when
he once returned late. But she added: "These things are so unusual, that
I have noticed them particularly.” 28

The rate of "desertion” among the house servants during and after the
war should have given sufficient warning that this traditionally loyal class
of blacks could behave in independent and unpredictable ways. That was
no less true of those who chose to remain with the families they had served

348

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

as slaves. Like Adele Allston of South Carolina, many a plantation mis¬
tress came away with mixed emotions about the postwar conduct of their
household staffs.

I can never feel kindly towards Nelly again.... Phebe gets into an ill
humor occasionally and jaws me, but on the whole she is very good. I
have agreed to give her $50 a year and Aleck the same, but Aleck has
been gone for a week and I think he will possibly not return.... I fear
Milly is tired being good and faithful. She appears discontented.

Within the intimacy and closeness of the Big House, the slightest incident,
misunderstanding, or exchange of words could precipitate a confrontation,
and in the aftermath of emancipation the sensibilities of both whites and
blacks could be easily provoked. Even while ostensibly carrying on their
normal duties, domestics had a way of irritating their mistresses or arous¬
ing their suspicions. "The servants torment me,” a South Carolina woman
wrote her sister, "but I suppose they do the same to everybody.” The
household in Augusta, Georgia, over which Eva B. Jones presided under¬
went a crisis when some money she had carefully saved and secreted
suddenly disappeared. The only question was which of the servants might
be the thief, and the evidence pointed to a freedwoman who was about to
become a bride "and has therefore indulged in some extravagancies and
petty fineries.” Upon hearing of this incident, Mary Jones, Eva’s mother-in-
law, responded with that familiar sigh, "We cannot but feel such ingrati¬
tude.” If she offered little more comfort, that may have reflected
preoccupation with her own persistent domestic irritations: Flora was
"most unhappy,” working very little, and apparently ready to leave; Jack
had moved into a Savannah boardinghouse, "where I presume he will
practice attitudes and act the Congo gentleman to perfection”; and Kate
and Flora, in "an amusing conversation” she overheard, talked about how
"they are looking forward to gold watches and chains, bracelets, and blue
veils and silk dresses!” To Mary Jones, it all seemed rather hopeless, and
she had given up trying to anticipate the behavior of her domestics. "It is
impossible to get at any of their intentions, and it is useless to ask them.
I see only a dark future for the whole race.” 26

As long as their servants retained the precious right of mobility, nei¬
ther the master nor the mistress could determine or control the outcome
of domestic conflicts. If servants felt insulted or compromised, or if the
employer resorted to the whip, they often chose to leave. Until additional
help could be hired, the mistress might try various expedients to fill the
gap. Eva Jones distributed the household duties among the remaining
servants and even assumed a few of the tasks herself. "Our menage has
been frightfully reduced,” she informed her mother-in-law, "and of our
numerous throng there remains a seamstress (who has had to lay aside her
old calling to become cook, washer, and chambermaid) and one who attends
to everything else about this unfortunate establishment.” Nor was it un-

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

349

common to transfer field hands to the house and make domestics of them.
To replace the "faithful” Patty, the Grimball family of South Carolina
hired a field hand and his family. With less success, Frances Butler Leigh
employed several "raw field hands, to whom everything was new and
strange, and who were really savages.” Sara Pryor, ill in bed and unable
to care for her children, replaced her maid (who left on Christmas morning)
with a field hand named Anarchy, but she soon determined that the new
servant’s hands, "knotted by work in the fields, were too rough to touch my
babe.” 27

Unprepared for the frustrations that close contact with whites could
provoke, some initiates into domestic service had brief tenures. On a Mis¬
sissippi plantation, the wife of a field hand was transferred to the house;
within a short time, troubles developed, words were exchanged, she
claimed she had been insulted, and she left her household duties undone
and remained in the quarters "doing nothing.” Some domestics, on the
other hand, found even more traumatic a sudden transfer from the house
to the fields to replace defecting laborers. Lizzie Hill, who had been a slave
in Alabama, remembered vividly the change in her duties after she re¬
turned to the plantation to be back with "Old Mistis” again; the position
she had previously occupied in the house had been filled, and "Fs had a
hard time workin’ in de field.” The more typical experience was that of
Dora Franks, a former Mississippi slave, who left her household duties to
accompany her brother after the war. Upon resettling on a new plantation,
she found herself in the fields and she would never forget her initiation into
that kind of labor: "Fd faint away mos’ ever’ day ’bout eleven o’clock. It was
de heat. Some of ’em would have to tote me to de house. Fd soon come to.
Den I had to go back to de fieF.” Such considerations may well have been
in the minds of some domestic servants when they chose to remain in their
same positions after emancipation. 28

Now that the last vestiges of old-time fidelity and devotion—however
tenuous these proved to be—were being stripped from the master-servant
relationship, white families needed to develop new sources of labor. When
Gertrude Thomas resorted to hiring, she found herself dismayed by the
experiment, and yet she revealed more about her own exploitative stan¬
dards than the incapacity of the employee.

Monday I had a woman to wash for me. Hired her for thirty cts a day.
I think it probable that she was one of the recently made free negroes.
I had no idea what was considered a task in washing so I gave her all the
small things belonging to the children ... She was through by dinner
time [and] appeared to work steady. I gave her dinner and afterwards told
her that I had a few more clothes I wished washed out. Her reply was that
"she was tired.” I did not for a minute argue with her. Said I "If you
suppose I engaged a woman to wash for me by the day and she stops by
dinner time, If you suppose I intend paying for the days work you are very
mistaken.” Turning from her I walked into the house. She afterwards

350

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

sent in for more clothes and washed out a few other things. So much for

hiring by the day.

But to her delight, she managed to hire a cook—an elderly mulatto woman
who claimed that her previous employer had sent her off to procure a new
position. Unfortunately, when Mrs. Thomas informed her husband of the
new acquisition, he insisted that the woman obtain a note from her old
employer before he would consent to hire her. This was not an uncommon
practice among white families after emancipation, partly a matter of per¬
sonal security but also intended to check the propensity of newly freed
blacks to change or improve their positions. To no one’s surprise, the cook
never returned. 29

In view of the experiences of some women, Gertrude Thomas might
have considered herself fortunate. After hiring new servants, several
Florida women found it necessary to count their spoons and forks every
night before locking them up in their bedrooms; Julia LeGrand of New
Orleans wondered if there was any alternative to "locking up and watch¬
ing,” and a South Carolina woman complained that her servants "'don’t
work very hard, but I do.” Emma Holmes would have little to do with her
newly hired washer after the woman complained of arduous labor; ""we
have a constant ebb and flow of servants,” she noted, ""some staying only
a few days, others a few hours—some thoroughly incompetent, others
though satisfactory to us, preferring plantation life.” Not surprisingly, the
new servants simply reinforced for many white families the prevailing
belief about the incapacity of free blacks for any kind of labor and even
provoked some of the old wartime laments. ""Three have run away during
the last few months that we had clothed up to be decent,” the wife of a
North Carolina planter wrote her mother. ""They came to us all but naked.
They are an ungrateful race. They drive me to be tight and stingy with
them.” This woman, until recently a resident of New York, needed little
time to learn that the frustrations of the employer class easily cross sec¬
tional lines. 80

None of this came as any surprise to Grace Elmore. ""The negro as a
hireling will never answer,” she confided to her diary in May 1865. ""They
have not principle enough, nor character enough to stand temptation. So
long as master and servant were one you could find honesty among the race
and even so it was a rarity.” But the times had clearly changed, the old ties
had been irrevocably severed, the blacks entertained strange, crude, and
false notions about work and freedom, and she doubted if they could really
survive the curse of emancipation. ""[N]ow that he has power to change his
place, and to escape punishment when detected, now that his and the
master’s interest are separate and there is no bond but dollars and cents
between them, I think the house servants will be chosen from the whites,
and that immediately.” Although she had not yet yielded to such logic, she
thought it only a matter of time before blacks were forced out of domestic
service altogether. After all, she asked, ""Who would employ the negro,

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

351

unless his slave, in any work that could be done by a white?... Who would
choose the black in any capacity except to be held as slave and so bound
to her obedient and faithful?” 31

The troublesome quality of black labor, both in the houses and in the
fields, encouraged experiments in the employment of whites for positions
traditionally held by blacks. After hiring two white girls, both of whom had
been seeking employment at a nearby factory, Donald MacRae, a North
Carolina merchant and planter, exulted in that novel feeling of independ¬
ence from his former slaves. His new servants were not at all disdainful
about performing the daily chores, they willingly did the kind of work
reserved for blacks, and they claimed competence in spinning, weaving,
cooking, washing, housework, tending children, and even plowing. While
they remained with him, MacRae felt no need to make any concessions to
retain his increasingly restless black help. 32

If nothing else, the absence of blacks in a household might soothe
otherwise shattered nerves and be a much-welcomed relief from daily irri¬
tations. To Ethelred Philips, the Florida farmer and physician, emancipa¬
tion had resulted in "worthless servants,” and he feared their continued
presence in his household. Now that he had hired a white girl, however,
“we find it so quiet and so comfortable to be rid of the negro.” He rested
much easier about the safety of his family, and he gloated over his pioneer¬
ing success: "The white women are taking the place of the negroes in our
village,” he informed his cousin, "and I take some credit for being the first
to make the experiment in the face of every body—not a man but declared
it would never do, yet I took a girl about 18 as ignorant and poor as any
cornfield negro, but respectable and willing to do any work to support
herself and mother and 6 children.” To transform a piney-woods girl into
an efficient domestic servant had been no inconsiderable task, but MacRae
boasted that his wife, "one of the most industrious and skillful housewives
I ever saw, has made her serve her purpose much better than a negro and
no darky dares enter my lot for fear of my dog.” 33

Wi thin the first year of emancipation, and periodically thereafter, the
introduction of whites, especially immigrants, into the fields and
households of former slaveholders came to be viewed as a panacea that
would surely strengthen the labor system, force the ex-slave to make a
realistic accommodation to freedom, and provide white planters with an
alternative to the increasingly humiliating and degrading dependency on
black labor. That is, the employment of whites, or perhaps only the threat
to do so, was a way to control the labor of the freedmen. "If white labor is
generally introduced into the upper District,” a South Carolina rice planter
vowed, "it will drive the Negro down, and then the competition for labor

352

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

will oblige them to work for very little.” White labor, moreover, would
provide the permanent and stable working force the South so desperately
required for the successful cultivation of its crops. Compared to the freed-
men, who "love change, and a month’s work at a place,” white people "love
home, take interest in making it pleasant, comfortable—as the spot from
which issue all their money and comforts.” 34

For those who accepted these assumptions, the proposition made good
sense, both racially and economically, and white Southerners certainly
enjoyed talking about it. In northern Florida, planters eager for white
laborers prepared to apply to New York City for help; a group ofTennessee
planters welcomed immigrants from the "industrious Germanic race” to
replace "the now indolent negro”; and the Virginia legislature resolved in
March 1866 that "the recent radical change in the labor system of the
South has rendered the introduction of a new class of laborers necessary.”
Principal attention focused for a time on the bold efforts of Mississippi and
Alabama planters to import Chinese laborers to work their fields. If racial
peculiarities had made black slaves ideal workers, similar characteristics
would enable the Chinese to answer the southern need for a docile, tracta¬
ble, adaptable labor force, with superior enduring powers and less propen¬
sity than blacks to fraternize with or intermarry with whites. "We’ve got
to change our whole system of labor,” an Alabama planter declared. "Why,
I was talking, down to Selma, the other day, with Jim Branson, up from
Hayttesville. We figured up, I don’t know how many millions of coolies
there are in China, that you can bring over for a song. It will take three
of ’em to do the work of two niggers; but they’ll live on next to nothing and
clothe themselves, and you’ve only got to pay ’em four dollars a month.
That’s our game now. And if it comes to voting, I reckon we can manage
that pretty well!” 35

This was bold talk, indeed, and it proved to be mostly talk. How to rid
themselves of the presence of the Negro was always a favorite topic of
conversation, permitting planters to share their frustrations, anger, and
fantasies with others, but few took it seriously. To talk about it perhaps
served a therapeutic need, if nothing else. "To get the privilege of govern¬
ing him [the Negro] as they pleased,” a Freedmen’s Bureau official in
Mississippi observed of the local planters, "they will express their anxiety
to get rid of him and many other foolish things; but come to the point—
they want and must have the negro to work the plantation.” Actually, some
Chinese laborers were imported, and small numbers of Swedes, Germans,
Dutchmen, and Irishmen were also induced to come to the South. But the
results of these experiments were less than gratifying and more often than
not failed to meet the expectations or needs of the planters. The new
immigrants were no more tractable than many of the freedmen, and re¬
placing troublesome blacks with troublesome immigrants not only made
little sense but the cost was apt to be higher. "They cost me $35 each to
bring them to Charleston from New York,” a South Carolina planter said
of the Dutchmen he had hired. "I fed them far better than ever I thought

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

353

of feeding my hands, even gave them coffee and sourkrout, when, what
should they do but demand butter for their bread and milk for their coffee,
and the next thing the whole crowd left me.” The Freedmen’s Bureau in
Virg inia concluded that recent efforts to recruit foreign immigrants to
replace blacks had been unsuccessful, and an English traveler in that state
thought he knew why: "Swedes, Germans, and Irishmen had been im¬
ported; but the Swedes refused to eat combread, the Germans sloped away
north-west-ward, in the hope of obtaining homesteads, and the Irishmen
preferred a city career. It seems that the South will have need of Sambo
yet awhile ...” Nor did the attempts to recruit native whites for domestic
service successfully overcome the stigma that still attached itself to that
lrinri of labor. "I tried to hire some white women to live with & assist my
family with their work,” a South Carolina planter testified. "They do not
like the idea of becoming 'Help.’ ” 36

The more the white South experimented with white labor, the more
the employer class came to appreciate the relative advantages of black
labor, free or slave. Such admissions did not always come easily, and whites
hastened to add that in "the professions, in the counting house, in the
workshops of the artisan, in the factory, and on the wave,” the white man
had no superior. But in the fields, as the cultivator of the great southern
staples, the Negro remained "unequalled,” both for his skills and his endur¬
ing powers. The experience of a Louisiana sugar planter prompted him to
estimate that "one able-bodied American negro of ordinary intelligence is
worth at least two white emigrants. He understands the business, and he
has the advantage of being acclimated.” Appreciative of this fact, he was
willing to pay even higher wages for blacks than for whites. "You may
think this extravagant; but during the unsettled state of affairs for the last
two years, I have had to try both, and I base my opinion not on my preju¬
dices, but on my experience.” With equal candor, the president of the
Virginia Agricultural Society reminded the delegates to a State Farmers’
Convention in 1866 that "we have in the labor of the freedmen a decided
advantage over other portions of the world.” After employing both foreign
and native white workers, he concluded that "the world cannot produce a
more skillful and efficient farm laborer than a well-trained Virginia negro
who is willing and able to work.” And for all the difficulties he had encoun¬
tered with his freedmen, Edward Barnwell Heyward, the South Carolina
rice planter, remained convinced that he could turn them into a productive
labor force. "The negroes themselves begin to see our superiority and
recognise in us their true Master. We are the only people who can ever get
them to do any thing, and I confess I do not look with much pleasure to the
timp when their places will be supplied by these still more savage Germans
as white labourers.” 37

Despite the experiments with white workers, despite all the talk about
replacing blacks, despite the calumnies heaped on the freedmen, the con¬
clusion reached by most practical-minded ex-slaveholders was that the
Negro remained ideally suited for their purposes. He had already proven

354

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

himself "peculiarly adapted by nature” to the cultivation of cotton, rice,
anH sugar, working under temperatures and conditions that would wilt any
white man. "The African don’t mind it,” an Alabama planter noted, "the
white man won’t stand it.” And so it came down to familiar discussions of
racial traits. When a Virginia planter and manufacturer affirmed that the
African race made ideal agricultural laborers, he enumerated their princi¬
pal virtues as "docility, tractability and affectionate disposition”—that is,
"just the material desirable and necessary.” Nor were blacks any less
valuable, some insisted, as domestics: the black nurse was "more affection¬
ate, more attached, and more devoted than the white,” while the black
servant was "more faithful and has less thought of self in his devotion to
his master and employer.” 38

If a Grace Elmore still insisted that the "separate” interests of blacks
and whites doomed the Negro as the principal laborer of the post-emancipa¬
tion South, the argument made little sense to planters who chose to view
the entire matter in businesslike terms. "There is now nothing between me
and the nigger but the dollar—the almighty dollar,” a Florida planter
declared, "and I shall make out of him the most I can at the least expense.”
That was a principle to which any nineteenth-century American employer
could have readily subscribed. 39

To discover one day, as did so many white women, that "I have not one
human being in the wide world to whom I can say 'do this for me’ ” had
to be a most disheartening realization. "We have truly said good bye to
being ladies of leisure,” Grace Elmore lamented, as she sought to adjust to
her new daily routine. "My time seems fully occupied and often I do not
have time to sleep even. My hour for rising is 5 o’clock.” Embittered by the
continuing defection of their servants, exasperated by the behavior of those
who remained, and unable to find satisfactory replacements, many families
found themselves forced into the unfamiliar role of doing the housework
themselves. No matter how they rationalized this change in their fives, and
whatever the orgy of self-congratulation that often accompanied the as¬
sumption of household responsibilities, the unprecedented nature of their
predicament provoked considerable dismay and disbelief. 40

To assume responsibility for the daily chores—to cook a meal, to dust
and sweep, to wash the clothes, to feed the horses and milk the cows—was
to undertake tasks they had previously watched their black folk perform.
"I always had thirty or forty niggers,” the wife of a Louisiana planter
declared. "I never even so much as washed out a pocket handkerchief with
my own hands, and now I have to do all my work.” With considerable
anguish, a Virginia woman admitted to her cousins in the North that it
would require "some time for us to get fixed to do our own house work or

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

355

to do with a few servants”; if nothing else, she noted, the distances separat¬
ing the kitchen, the spring, and the dining room seemed all too formidable.
Like so many "ladies” she knew, Gertrude Thomas found herself sharing
the household chores with the few remaining servants. The sheer novelty
of the experience struck her with wonderment. Not only did she assist in
washing the breakfast dishes—"a thing I never remember to have done
except once or twice in my life”—but she startled one of the servants by
announcing that she intended to do the ironing. "It was amusing to see his
look of astonishment but indeed the necessity for it appeared qu[i]te im[m]i-
nent.” That night, she described the experience in her journal, concluding,
"I am tired and sleepy.” 41

To hear white families relate their experiences, the initiation into
domestic labor had its moments of self-satisfaction and even triumph. The
spectacle of "fragile women,” left without any servants, "cooking and
washing without a murmur,” moved Emma Holmes to extol the "heroism
and spirit” of southern womanhood. With less flourish, a Virginia woman
described how she missed "the familiar black faces” she had grown to love.
"Domestic cares are making me gray! But I get some fun trying to do things
I never did before.” Eva Jones had to tell her mother-in-law how she ex¬
pected "to become a very efficient chambermaid and seamstress,” though she
confessed that the sewing came "very hard to my poor unused fingers.” 42

The first days of performing domestic chores could even be an ex¬
hilarating experience. Charlotte S. J. Ravenel took pride in "how nicely”
she had prepared a meal, while another South Carolina woman, after
scrubbing the wash "until my poor hands are skinned,” took some consola¬
tion in how "white and clean” the clothes looked. None of these women,
however, matched in exuberance the triumph felt by William Heyward,
the elderly rice planter who had taken up residence in Charleston. Dis¬
gusted with the familiarity, deficiencies, and insolence of the black waiters,
he gave up boarding at a local hotel and resolved to cook his own meals.
Although he kept an old Irish chambermaid to tidy his room, Heyward
learned to do his own shopping, washing, and cooking. After a month, he
claimed "perfect success” and hailed his achievement as a personal victory.
"A part of the satisfaction,” he confessed, "is, that I am perfectly inde¬
pendent of having Negroes about me; if I cannot have them as they used
to be, I have no desire to see them except in the field.” 43

Few took up the challenge more diligently than the Andrews family
in Washington, Georgia. Of the twenty-five servants who had formerly
been their slaves, only five remained, and two of these were too ill to work.
Young Eliza Andrews found herself cleaning the downstairs with her sis¬
ter, while her mother washed the dishes. At first, it all seemed quite
strange. "It is very different from having a servant always at hand to
attend to your smallest need,” Miss Andrews confided to her journal, "but
I can’t say that I altogether regret the change; in fact, I had a very merry
time over my work.” To this proud young Georgia woman, the menial tasks
she now performed were nothing less than a challenge to her race and sex.

356

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

I don’t think I shall mind working at all when I get used to it. Everybody
else is doing housework, and it is so funny to compare our experiences.
Father says this is what has made the Anglo-Saxon race great; they are
not afraid of work, and when put to the test, never shirk anything that
they know has got to be done, no matter how disagreeable. 44

Whatever the enthusiasm that marked these work experiences, few
white men or women who had once owned slaves could overcome the
feeling that they were demeaning themselves in performing the tasks
thought to be fit only for black hands. Having reassured herself that south¬
ern white womanhood had more than met the test, Eliza Andrews won¬
dered why young ladies like herself should be placed in the predicament
of performing labor that was clearly unworthy of them.

[T]t does seem to me a.waste of time for people who are capable of doing
something better to spend their time sweeping and dusting while scores
of lazy negroes that are fit for nothing else are lying around idle. Dr.
Calhoun suggested that it would be a good idea to import some of those
man-apes from Africa and teach them to take the place of the negroes,
but Henry said that just as soon as we had got them tamed, and taught
them to be of some use, those crazy fanatics at the North would insist on
coming down here to emancipate them. 45

If some white women initially derived satisfaction from domestic la¬
bor, steady exposure to that kind of work took its inevitable toll, not only
in physical and mental exhaustion but in frayed temperaments. After
failing to iron some items properly, Julia LeGrand confessed to feeling
"anything but spiritual-minded. I got angry with my irons which would
smut my muslins, and then got angry with myself for having been angry
—finally divided the blame, giving a part to Julie Ann for running away
and leaving me to do her work..The more the women worked, the more
they came to resent these new demands on their time and the less able they
were to enjoy the usual pastimes of "ladies.” When Eliza Andrews attended
the "charming” party to which she had been invited, she found herself “too
tired” to enjoy or partake of the dancing. And when she retired that night,
she was too exhausted to sleep, her legs "ached as if they had been in the
stocks,” and she wondered how long she could maintain this grueling pace.
"[W]hen I become more accustomed to hard work, I hope it won’t be so bad.
I think it is an advantage to clean up the house ourselves, sometimes, for
we do it so much better than the negroes.” The next few days, however,
hardly reassured her. The morning after the party, Eliza arose long before
her accustomed hour and helped to clean the house. When guests dropped
in that day as she prepared to take a nap, there was still more work to do.
"I never was so tired in my life; every bone in my body felt as if it were
ready to drop out, and my eyes were so heavy that I could hardly keep them
open.” Finally, she confessed to herself, "I don’t find doing housework quite
so much of a joke as I imagined it was going to be, especially when we have

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

357

company to entertain at the same time, and want to make them enjoy
themselves/’ After dinner, Eliza reluctantly went off to a dance she had
promised to attend. "I was so tired that I made Jim Bryan tell the boys not
to ask me to dance.” The next morning, the same seemingly endless routine
repeated itself. "I had to be up early and clean up my room, though half¬
dead with fatigue.” That evening, she went to bed as soon as she had eaten
her supper. 46

Like Eliza Andrews, the outspoken Emma Holmes of Camden, South
Carolina, had performed her first household tasks with considerable zeal
and a sense of personal commitment. "Of course it occupies a good deal of
time,” she observed in May 1865, "but the servants find we are by no means
entirely dependent on them.” That feeling in itself gave her immense
satisfaction. Less than a month later, some of that enthusiasm had waned:
"I was very tired yesterday, after my various pieces of manual labor, but
hope they will drive off headache as medicine wont. I was up at five to¬
day . ..” Still, she persisted, trying to put the best face on her labors as
still another servant left the household. "[W]e girls went to ironing, and
though of course it was fatiguing, standing so long, it was not near as
difficult nor as hard work as I fancied.” But by mid-August, after
another day of household chores, she sounded a rather different note.
"I dont like cooking or washing, even the doing up of muslins is great
annoyance to me and I do miss the having all ready prepared to my hand.
I generally rise at five or before, though sometimes not till six, when very
tired, but often rouse servants and household by going to sweep the draw¬
ing room.” Later that month, the initial excitement had all but vanished.
"I am very weary, standing up washing all the breakfast and dinner china,
bowls, kettles, pans, silver, etc. and minding Sims, churning, washing
stockings, etc.—a most miscellaneous list of duties, leaving no time for
reading or exercise .. .” 47

Never once did Emma Holmes or any of the other women who de¬
scribed their admittedly difficult experiences with housework think to
question how their black help had for so many years performed these same
duties, day after day, while also caring for a husband and children. Perhaps
the question never even entered their minds. This was, as they had discov¬
ered, labor suited only for black hands—or, as Eliza Andrews suggested, for
"negroes that are fit for nothing else.” Mary Chesnut, who never suffered
these ordeals, seemed to understand better than most what housework
entailed. "Ellen is a poor maid, but if I do a little work, it is quite enough
to show me how dreadful it would be if I should have to do it all.” Only
many years later, when she reflected over the black folks who had served
her, did Kate Stone begin to realize the monstrous demands she had made
on them.

Even under the best owners, it was a hard, hard life: to toil six days out

of seven, week after week, month after month, year after year, as long

as life lasted; to be absolutely under the control of someone until the last

breath was drawn; to win but the bare necessaries of life, no hope of more,

358

BEEN IN THE STOEM SO LONG

no matter how hard the work, how long the toil; and to know that nothing
could change your lot. Obedience, revolt, submission, prayers—all were
in vain. Waking sometimes in the night as I grew older and thinking it
all over, I would grow sick with the misery of it all.

Nor, as she now realized, had the domestics escaped arduous labor. The
seamstress always had "piles of work ahead,” while the washerwoman
labored all week to keep the family in clean clothes. And the cook needed
to prepare three abundant meals a day for the thirteen to twenty whites
who were almost always present, not to mention the more lavish dinners
and entertainments. "Thinking it over by the light of later experience, I
know our cook was a hardworked creature. Then, we never thought about
it.” 48

To the women who had been accustomed to domestic help, self-reliance
never came easily, if at all. The early exuberance and self-congratulation
turned into deep resentment and cries of despair, reflecting both physical
exhaustion and psychic humiliation. "I am tired—tired tonight, will all the
days of the year be like this one?” the young mistress on a Florida planta¬
tion asked. "What are we going to do without the negroes?” Many years
later, she could still recall "the wearisome hours, when only pride kept us
up!... oh, the trials of those days to the housekeepers who had always been
accustomed to first-class service!” The women who had derived such satis¬
faction from "trying to do things I never did before” turned before long to
more somber reflections and more realistic appraisals. That brave talk
about Anglo-Saxon adaptability and how it had been "a great relief to get
rid of the horrid negroes” turned increasingly to nostalgic recollections of
how much easier and simpler life had been before the disruption of the
labor system and the loss of their servants. 49

"Slavery was bad economy, I know,” a Tennessee woman conceded.
"But oh,” she added, "it was glorious! Fd give a mint of money right now
for servants like I once had,—to have one all my own! Ladies at the North,
if they lose their servants, can do their own work; but we can’t, we can’t!”
The housegirl who had once served her so faithfully had now taken up
dressmaking in St. Louis. "She could read and write as well as I could.
There was no kind of work that girl couldn’t do. And so faithful!—I trusted
everything to her, and was never deceived.” Although revealing how de¬
pendent she had been on black labor, this woman thought emancipation
had been a cruel blow to the slaves who had served their white folks so well.
"Emancipation is a worse thing for our servants than for us. They can’t
take care of themselves.” 50

Rather than rendering them independent of their former slaves, the
attempts of white families to hire white replacements or to work them¬
selves only underscored their dependency. The incessant talk about ridding

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

359

themselves of the ex-slaves may have impressed certain northern reporters
but it never fooled the blacks. "Dey was glad to have a heap of colored
people bout dem, cause white folks couldn’ work den no more den dey can
work dese days like de colored people can,” recalled Josephine Bacchus, a
former South Carolina slave. With equal cogency, a plantation mistress, in
expressing gratitude for the blacks who had remained with her, acknowl¬
edged that "they can’t spare me, and I can’t spare them .” 51

The sense of responsibility, obligation, and duty, invoked so often by
the slaveholding class to justify keeping an "inferior, helpless and child¬
like” race in bondage, could obviously work both ways. The dependency of
white families helps to explain the outrage and cries of ingratitude that
greeted defecting and troublesome blacks, as it does the immense comfort
those same families derived from some of their former slaves who chose to
remain. Concerned for the welfare of her mother, Eliza Huger Smith of
South Carolina went to considerable lengths to persuade a valuable ser¬
vant to stay in the household after emancipation. "Hennie’s decision to
remain with me,” she said afterwards, "is a great relief on Mamma’s
account as she is as dependent on her as a baby—more so.” In a Georgia
household, where all the servants had left, Hope L. Jones thought it a sad
blow to her Aunt Bella, "since she is old and needs them more than ever.” 52

Even as whites acknowledged, at least to themselves, the urgent need
to retain their black laborers and servants, they recognized the continued
importance of controlling that labor. With emancipation, the pecuniary
loss had been difficult enough to absorb. But to lose control over their
former slaves, to be deprived of the necessary disciplinary powers, to be
subject to their "insolence,” to be forced to endure their work slowdowns
and other manifestations of independence, to be compelled to deal with
them as equals was to demand too much, even as the price of military
defeat. "We can’t feel towards them as you do,” a young South Carolina
planter tried to explain to a northern visitor. "I suppose we ought to, but
’t is n’t possible for us. They’ve always been our owned servants, and we’ve
been used to having them mind us without a word of objection, and we can’t
bear anything else from them now. If that’s wrong, we’re to be pitied sooner
than blamed, for it’s something we can’t help.” Although discouraged by
the postwar conduct of his former slaves, he could not conceive of doing
without them. "I never did a day’s work in my life, and don’t know how to
begin.” 53

Realizing how dependent they remained on black labor, those who had
once held slaves concluded that the freed blacks needed them more ur¬
gently now than ever before. To make this absolutely clear, the planter
class devised a rationale as familiar and elaborate as the argument they
had used to justify slavery. What they wished to demonstrate, however,
seemed so obvious to them as to require little proof—that the Negro as a
free person could neither survive nor be a serviceable worker unless he
remained under their care and protection. "The Negro stands as much in
need of a master to guide him as a child does,” a Virginia planter explained.
"When I look at my servants, I feel weighing upon me all the responsibili-

360

BEEN IN THE STOEM SO LONG

" FF T

ties of a parent_The Negro will always need the care of someone supe¬

rior to him, and unless in one form or another it is extended to him, the
race will first become pauper and then disappear.” Along similar lines, the
provisional governor of South Carolina, no doubt with his conquerors in
mind, asked the obvious question: "If all the children in New York City
were turned loose to provide for themselves, how many would live, prosper,
and do well? The negroes are as improvident as children, and require the
guardian protection of some one almost as much as they do.” 54

To retain the laborers he needed so badly, "old massa” once again cast
himself in the familiar role of the beneficent protector, exercising a paren¬
tal and providential vigilance over a helpless, childlike, and easily misled
race. He could do no less for those who had been accustomed to look to him
for direction and sustenance. "They are the descendants in a great degree
of the woman who nursed me,” a Maryland congressman declared. "They
... look upon me as their protector. I am in truth their only friend. Am I
to turn them off as outcasts on the world? I have been my whole life
engaged in their protection. I have an affection for them, and have a duty
to perform for them.... They have labored for me, it is true, but they have
in turn received from me quite as much as they have given me.” Consistent
with their view that slavery had been the best possible condition for a
people unable to look after themselves, the former masters viewed emanci¬
pation as an unfortunate if not tragic consequence of the war. But the
Negro, they emphasized, should not be held responsible. "It is not their
fault they are free,” the new governor of Florida asserted; "they had noth¬
ing to do with it; that was brought about by 'the results and operations of
the war.’ ” 55

Although revealing an abysmal ignorance of black attitudes and ac¬
tions, the argument that Negroes had nothing to do with their freedom
would be repeated in many different forms, the principle itself would be
written into several of the new state constitutions, and it reflected an
abiding faith in the black laborer if only left in the hands of those who knew
him best. "The negro isn’t to blame for his freedom,” a Georgia planter told
a northern reporter. "He served us faithfully all through the war, and I
sincerely believe very few planters have any desire to see him injured. We
know his ways; and if you give us time, I think we shall be able to get him
back into his place again,—not as a slave, but as a good producer.” Freedom
had been forced upon the slave, an Alabama judge told a grand jury in Pike
County, and it behooved the South to show compassion for the "faithful old
negro” who was now an involuntary freedman without the experience, the
self-reliance, or the ability to understand and appreciate his new status.
"He may have been the companion of your boyhood,” he reminded them;
"he may be older than you, and perhaps carried you in his arms when an
infant. You may be bound to him by a thousand ties which only a southern
man knows, and which he alone can feel in all their force.” Nor could the
freedman be blamed for the "excesses” that had characterized the transi¬
tion in his status. "He has always been a child in intellect,” Charles C.

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

361

Jones, Jr., explained to his mother, while sympathizing with "severe trials”
she had experienced, "improvident, incapable of appreciating the obliga¬
tions of a contract, ignorant of the operation of any law other than the will
of his master, careless of the future, and without the most distant concep¬
tion of the duties of life and labor now devolved upon him.” 56

Even if whites chose to view the old ties with varying degrees of sympa¬
thy, they could readily appreciate the forcefulness and timeliness of the
argument. Now that the slaves had been freed, through no fault of their
own, the burden of emancipation demanded of the old slaveholding class
the same exercise of paternal solicitude and authority; indeed, the need
had never been greater. If anything, the very suddenness of freedom, thrust
upon an unprepared people, had increased the master’s obligations and
duty to a race possessing neither the physical nor the mental resources to
care for themselves. "They are like grown up children turned adrift in the
world,” Eliza Andrews observed. "The negro is something like the Irish¬
man in his blundering good nature, his impulsiveness and improvidence,
and he is like a child in having always had someone to think and act for
him.” What had characterized slavery, many whites continued to argue,
had been a kind of benevolent patriarchy. Even if slavery had been some¬
times oppressive, even if it had not been free of excesses and defects, even
if it had brutalized some bondsmen, this much-maligned institution, ac¬
cording to its practitioners, had given the bulk of the race a necessary
protection which freedom now threatened to remove. "How much better off
they were when slaves!” a Mississippi planter affirmed. "A man would see
to his own niggers, like he would to his own stock. But the niggers now don’t
belong to anybody, and it’s no man’s business whether they live or die.” 57

If dependency on the master had protected and sustained the Negro
as a slave, what would happen to him as a freedman? How would he
manage to survive in a hostile and competitive environment, exposed now
to unfriendly whites, his own innate vices, and a free-market economy?
Such questions grew out of a tradition of proslavery argument, and the
answer seemed no less obvious after emancipation. Without the patriar¬
chal guidance and support of the former master, the African race would
surely exterminate itself. "The child is already born who will behold the
last negro in the State of Mississippi,” a Natchez newspaper affirmed in
early 1866. Whatever agreement existed among whites about the future of
the Negro as a free man invariably revolved around the conviction that he
would sink lower and lower in the social scale, that he would dissipate the
civilizing influences he had acquired from contact with his master, and that
he could never survive the competitive struggle for life with a superior
race. The antislavery movement, in other words, would soon discover that
in abolishing slavery it had abolished* the race itself 58

Historical analogies came quickly to mind. The freed slaves now faced
a doom not unlike that of the other inferior and degraded species in their
midst—the Indian. If anything, the African race might diminish at an even
more rapid rate. "They’re a-goin’ faster’n the Injins,” a Georgia planter

362

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

insisted. "The negro is the most inferior of the human races,” Grace Elmore
argued from her home in South Carolina several months before the first
of her servants defected, "far beneath the Indian or Hindu, and how can
it be expected that they will be the white mans equal. It will be with them
as with the Indian.” But like most, she held out a modicum of hope: "The
negro will disappear except where he is kept in subjection, and conse¬
quently where it will be [in] the interest of the master to promote the
welfare of body and soul.” 59

The logic of the argument seemed irresistible. If a master did not look
out for the welfare of the ex-slave, no one else would, including the ex¬
slave himself. Nor could the unfortunate Negro be blamed for the innate
vices and defects he shared with most tropical peoples—what a Mississippi
planter called the "indisposition to provide for the future by sustained
industry and persevering efforts.” The typical Negro, as the whites viewed
him, worked only to satisfy immediate wants; he was careless or thought¬
less of anything beyond the present. Unlike most whites, he was not moti¬
vated by a desire for gain; hence, he was apt to do nothing after earning
a little money until starvation forced him back to work. 60 If the arguments
about improvidence and the absence of initiative had a familiar ring about
them, they had traditionally characterized upper-class and employer atti¬
tudes toward laboring peoples, white and black. A Georgia planter reflected
this view when he advised some fellow planters that the problems they now
faced were class rather than racial in nature. "I’ll tell you how’t is: a free
nigger’s jest like any low-down white fellow,—pull off your coat and work
with him, and he does well enough; put it on and go off to town, and he
shirks.” 61

In forecasting the doom of the Afro-American race, many whites has¬
tened to add their regrets that this should be the outcome of emancipation.
The paternal spirit manifested itself in expressions of sympathy and re¬
morse and in outbursts of nostalgia. "If you had seen them in slave days,”
one planter told an English visitor, "what a merry, rollicking, laughing set
they were! Now they are care-worn and sad. You hardly hear them laugh
now as they used to do.” When the first postwar governor of Mississippi
declared that the Negro was "destined to extinction, beyond all doubt,” he
thought it "alarming” and "appalling” and hoped he might be mistaken;
a South Carolina magistrate "pitied” the freedmen for their inabilit y to
understand the freedom thrust upon them; and the Virginia planter who
expected the race to "first become pauper and then disappear” still wished
the freedmen well and "sincerely” hoped they would disappoint his expec¬
tations. But there was good reason to suspect that professions of this kind
were not altogether sincere. That is, the former ruling class had a peculiar
stake in black failure. 6 *

While traveling by rail through the countryside of western Tennessee,
J. T. Trowbridge, the northern journalist and author, caught occasional
glimpses of homeless ex-slaves huddled around the campfires in their
makeshift settlements, warming their hands and watching with curiosity

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

363

as the train rolled by them. The conversation he overheard of his fellow
passengers might have been repeated almost anywhere in the South when
native whites came across such scenes:

"That’s freedom! that’s what the Yankees have done for ’em!”

"They’ll all be dead before spring.”

"The Southern people were always their best friends. How I pity
them! don’t you?”

"Oh, yes, of course I pity them! How much better off they were when
they were slaves!”

What dismayed Trowbridge were not the remarks themselves (he had
heard them so often) but the expressions of "grim exultation” and the
" T-told-you-so!’ air of triumph” that accompanied them, as though their
prophecies were their desires. "The slave-owners, having foretold that free¬
dom would prove fatal to the bondman, experienced a satisfaction in seeing
their predictions come true. The usual words of sympathy his condition
suggested had all the hardness and hollowness of cant.” 83

To think that the freedmen could possibly succeed defied logic and
nature and contradicted the very reasons they had been held as slaves.
How much more reassuring to argue that emancipation—unless properly
controlled—sealed the race’s doom and that the abolitionists had succeeded
only in expediting racial suicide. This belief rested, of course, on the popu¬
lar assumption that the character and capacity of the Negro remained
immutable; emancipation only filled his head with dreams and aspirations
which could never be fulfilled. But that in itself raised a potentially danger¬
ous situation requiring the utmost vigilance and understanding. If blacks
should aspire to rise above their appointed station in life, the results were
predictable. "Of course, they’ll fail,” an Alabama planter assured a north¬
ern visitor; "we have no uneasiness on that score; but we sire the friends
of these people, and we are sorry to see them expose themselves to so much
misery in making attempts that we know from the outset must be abortive.
Isn’t it better to have the laws in some way take the matter out of their
hands and make them work?” 84

If the African race was to survive, then, the old slaveholding class
deemed it essential that they determine the conditions of survival—prefer¬
ably a forced dependency allowing the freedman little or no opportunity to
prove his own individual worth. Before emancipation, the planters had
argued that they kept the Negro in bondage for his own benefit. Now they
could contend that the freedman’s welfare demanded a condition of tute¬
lage and a system of constructive compulsion. After all, to expect that
self-interest alone would motivate ex-slaves, as it did whites, to be produc¬
tive laborers was to betray ignorance of the race itself. "You don’t know
the niggers,” a young Virginian told a northern reporter. "No nigger, free
or slave, in these Southern States, nor in any part of the known world, ever
would work or ever will work unless he’s made to.” 88

Although the former slaveholders constituted a small minority of the
white population of the South, nearly everyone still looked to them for
leadership and supported the urgent need to impose controls on the newly
freed blacks. To play on white fears of the Negro, moreover, as most plant¬
ers recognized, served an important function in maintaining their own
supremacy and in muting class antagonisms. Despite the abolition of slav¬
ery, the attitudes, fears, and assumptions which had helped to shape and
reinforce that institution for over two centuries remained virtually un¬
affected. When the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner in Mississippi and
Louisiana commented on the state of white opinion in the post-emancipa¬
tion South, he invited attack as a northern partisan but the evidence was
altogether too compelling to discount his conclusions:

Wherever I go—the street, the shop, the house, the hotel, or the steam¬
boat—I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are
yet unable to conceive of the negro as possessing any rights at all. Men
who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors will cheat
a negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a negro they
do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think forni¬
cation; to take the property away from a negro they do not consider
robbery. The people boast that when they get freedmen affairs in their
own hands, to use their own classic expression, "the niggers will catch
helL ,,

The reason of all this is simple and manifest. The whites esteem the
blacks their property by natural right, and however much they may
admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been
destroyed by the war and by the President’s emancipation proclamation,
they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the
whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves they treat the colored
people just as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate. 66

No doubt some southern whites might have thought this a crude character¬
ization of their thinking, but nearly every white man and woman readily
agreed to the wisdom of restraining and controlling black men and women
in ways that were not thought to be necessary for themselves. 'The whites
seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the
same thing as freedom for them,” a northern reporter concluded after his
travels in the postwar South. "I did not anywhere find a man who could
see that laws should be applicable to all persons alike; and hence even the
best men hold that each State must have a negro code.” 67

Despite a white rhetoric that doomed the freedmen to self-extinction,
most planters needed and demanded their labor. And despite all the talk
about a childlike race, most whites expected blacks to work and behave like

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

365

mature adults. Although the war and emancipation had, in the view of
whites, filled the heads of their former slaves with unrealistic expectations
and rendered their labor erratic, they refused to give up on them al¬
together, at least not until time-honored remedies proved ineffectual.
Whether he had ever owned slaves or not, almost every white man re¬
mained convinced that only rigid controls and compulsion would curtail
the natural propensity of blacks toward idleness and vagrancy, induce
them to labor for others, and correct their mistaken notions about freedom
and working for themselves. Claiming an intimate and exclusive knowl¬
edge of the Negro’s character ("We are the only ones that understand the
nigger”), the former slaveholder demanded the necessary force to back up
the traditional rights of authority over "his people,” including the punish¬
ment of deviant behavior. Without compulsion of some kind, the experi¬
ment in free labor could not succeed. It was as simple as that . 68

The self-evident truth which the planter class now imparted to the
freed slaves was that they must either work for white folks or starve. That
advice differed in no significant way from what Federal officials had been
telling blacks since the moment of liberation. "When that lesson has been
thoroughly learned and inwardly digested,” a Macon newspaper declared,
"the negro may perhaps be of some value.” Whatever sympathies North¬
erners pretended for the Negro, southern whites assumed they could not
object to a principle so universally accepted. "All we want,” a South
Carolina planter told a northern visitor, "is that our Yankee rulers should
give us the same privileges with regard to the control of labor which they
themselves have.” When pressed for his understanding of northern labor
controls, he indicated that laborers were bound by law to make an annual
contract and could be punished for any violations. Told that no such laws
existed in the North, the planter seemed incredulous. "How do you manag e
without such laws? How can you get work out of a man unless you compel
him in some way?” The visitor replied that "Natural laws” sufficed, with
the best laborers commanding the best wages. "You can’t do that way with
niggers,” the planter immediately retorted. When comparing the two labor
systems, some southern whites insisted, in fact, that this distinction be
understood—the presence of the African race made the southern situation
unique and demanded a unique response. "Northern laborers are like other
men,” one planter explained, but "southern laborers are nothing but nig¬
gers, and you can’t make anything else out of them. They’re not controlled
by the same motives as white men, and unless you have power to compel
them, they’ll only work when they can’t beg or steal enough to keep from
starving .” 89

The urgency of the situation seemed obvious enough. To plant a crop
without knowing how many laborers might be around to harvest it made
postwar agricultural operations a highly risky venture. Henry W. Ravenel,
for example, thought no planter would want to engage in such operations
"without some guarantee that his labour is to be controlled & continued
under penalties & forfeitures.” To make the free labor system work, some

366

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

planters suggested that the ex-slaves be apprenticed to their former mas¬
ters or to an employer of their choice. The apprenticeship laws enacted by
a number of states imposed such controls on blacks under eighteen years
of age who were orphans or whose parents could not or refused to support
them. Such laws provided some planters with a cheap supply of invol¬
untary labor (if he were deemed a "suitable” person, the former owner of
the minor was given preference); at the same time, the arbitrary power
these laws usually gave to the courts to bind out such children with¬
out the consent of their parents revived the specter of families forcibly sep¬
arated . 70

The i dea of apprenticing nearly four million ex-slaves to their former
masters never received serious consideration. Nor did the proposals to
distribute the freed blacks equally around the country or to colonize them
elsewhere make any sense to planters who desperately needed laborers . 71
Anxious to regain control over their blacks, but not entirely indifferent to
northern reactions, the planter class preferred to establish a docile black
labor force in the guise of fulfilling their Christian duties and obligations
to those who had once served them so well. Claiming sympathy for their
former slaves, they demanded the controls necessary to make them once
again "happy and prosperous.” To control and regulate the freedmen was
to advance and protect the best interests of this unfortunate race, to help
thom restrain their "worst passions,” to redeem them from certain relapse
into semi-barbarism, to save them from ''inevitable failure, to disabuse
their minHa of false illusions, and to assist them in finding their proper
pi are in postwar southern society. "If they cannot (as they never can)
occupy the places of legislators, judges, teachers, &c.,” a North Carolina
planter explained, "they may be useful as tillers of the soil, as handicrafts¬
men, as servants in various situations, and be happy in their domestic and
famil y relations.... It is our Christian duty to encourage them to these
ends .” 72 That was putting the best possible face on the legislation adopted
by most of the ex-Confederate states to regulate the freedmen—laws that
came to be known collectively as the Black Codes.

To the white South, the principle seemed altogether clear and fair-
minded: "Teach the negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and
behaves himself, he will be protected by our white laws.” Although borrow¬
ing heavily from antebellum restrictions on free Negroes, as well as from
northern apprenticeship laws and Freedmen’s Bureau and War Depart¬
ment regulations, the Black Codes were still very much a product of post¬
war southern thinking, both a legal expression of the lingering paternalism
(to protect the ex-slave from himself) and a legislative response to immedi¬
ate and pressing economic problems. While the Codes defined the freed-
man’s civil and legal rights, permitting him to marry, hold and sell
property, and sue and be sued, the key provisions were those which defined
him as an agricultural laborer, barred or circumscribed any alternative
occupations, and compelled him to work. "Upon this point turns the entire
question,” a South Carolina newspaper said of the principle of compulsion,

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

367

"and as that is decided, so is the safety or ruin of this country.” If the Codes
did not reestablish slavery, as some northern critics charged, neither did
they recognize the former slaves as free men and women, entitled to equal
protection under the law. As if to underscore how little had changed, a
South Carolina law defined the two parties to a labor contract as "servants”
and "masters .” 73

Although the laws differed from state to state, the underlying princi¬
ples and the major provisions remained the same. If found without "lawful
employment,” a freedman could be arrested as a common vagrant, jailed
and fined; if unable to pay the fine, he would be hired out to an employer
who in turn assumed the financial liability and deducted it from the labor¬
er’s wages. The Mississippi law also defined as vagrants any blacks unable
or unwilling to pay a new tax to support Negro indigents, while the Ala¬
bama code included as vagrants "any runaway, stubborn servant or child”
and any laborer "who loiters away his time” or fails to comply with the
terms of his employment. Several of the codes also set down the hours of
labor (from sunrise to sunset), the duties, and the behavior expected of
black agricultural workers. With a sliding scale of fines for violations, the
Louisiana code employed the kind of language a master might have once
used in his instructions to the overseer:

Bad work shall not be allowed. Failing to obey reasonable orders, neglect
of duty, and leaving home without permission will be deemed disobedi¬
ence; impudence, swearing, or indecent language to, or in the presence
of the employer, his family, or agent, or quarreling and fighting with one
another shall be deemed disobedience . 74

Rather than expedite the slave’s transition to freedom or help him to
realize his aspirations, the Black Codes embodied in law the widely held
assumption that he existed largely for the purpose of raising crops for a
white employer. Although the ex-slave ceased to be the property of a mas¬
ter, he could not aspire to become his own master. No law stated the
proposition quite that bluntly but the provisions breathed that spirit in
ways that could hardly be misunderstood. If a freedman decided that agri¬
cultural labor was not his special calling, the law often left him with no
practical alternative. To discourage those who aspired to be artisans, me¬
chanics, or shopkeepers, or who already held such positions, the South
Carolina code, for example, prohibited a black person from entering any
employment except agricultural labor or domestic service unless he ob¬
tained a special license and a certification from a local judge of his "skill
and fitness” and "good moral character.” This provision, of course, threat¬
ened to undermine the position of the old free Negro class which had once
nearly dominated the skilled trades in places like Charleston. With uncon¬
cealed intent, the Mississippi law simply required special licenses of any
black wishing to engage in "irregular or job work.” To discourage freedmen
who aspired to raise their own crops, Mississippi barred them from renting

368

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

or leasing any land outside towns or cities, leaving to local authorities any
restrictions they might wish to place on black ownership of real estate.

By adopting harsh vagrancy laws and restricting non-agricultural em¬
ployment, the white South clearly intended to stem the much-feared drift
of freedmen toward the cities and to underscore their status as landless
agricultural laborers. Even as Mississippi forbade them to lease lands out¬
side towns or cities, local ordinances there and in neighboring Louisiana
made black residency within the towns or cities virtually intolerable if not
impossible. The ordinance adopted in Opelousas, Louisiana, deservedly
served as a model and inspiration for other communities. To enter the
town, a black person needed his employer’s permission, stipulating the
object of the visit and the time necessary to accomplish it; any freedman
found on the streets after ten o’clock at night without a written pass or
permit from his employer would be subject to arrest and imprisonment. No
freedman could rent or keep a house within the town limits "under any
circumstances,” or reside within the town unless employed by a white
person who assumed responsibility for his conduct. To hold any public
meetings or to assemble in large numbers for any reason, blacks needed the
mayor’s permission, as they also did to "preach, exhort or otherwise de¬
claim” to black congregations. Nor could they possess weapons or sell,
barter, or exchange any kind of merchandise without special permits. A
freedman found violating these ordinances could be punished by imprison¬
ment, fines, and forced labor on the city streets. Virtually identical ordi¬
nances were adopted in several Louisiana towns and parishes, with St.
Landry Parish adding its own brand of punishment: "confining the body of
the offender within a barrel placed over his or her shoulders, in the manner
practiced in the army,” for a period not to exceed twelve hours. While
finding the ordinances "incompatible with freedom,” the black newspaper
in New Orleans noted that freedmen could walk the streets up to ten
o’clock at night—one hour later than under slavery. "This additional hour
is the fruit of our victories in the field,” the editor declared; "four years of
a bloody war have been fought to gain that one hour. The world certainly
moves in that quarter .” 75

With the adoption of the Black Codes, the place of the ex-slave in
postwar southern society had been fixed in law, his mobility checked, his
bargaining power sharply reduced, and his rights of appeal hedged with
difficulties. Any freedman who refused to work at the prevailing wage in
a particular area could be defined as a vagrant, and there was little to
protect him from combinations of employers setting wages and conditions.
To many in the North, the Codes smacked of the old bondage, and even
some southern whites thought them ill-advised, impractical, or at least
badly timed. "We showed our hand too soon, ” a Mississippi planter con¬
ceded. "We ought to have waited till the troops were withdrawn, and our
representatives admitted to Congress; then we could have had everything
our own way.” Unmoved by the criticism they anticipated, the authors of
the Florida code thought it "needless to attempt to satisfy the exactions of

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

369

the fanatical theorists—we have a duty to perform—the protection of our
wives and children from threatened danger, and the prevention of scenes
which may cost the extinction of an entire race.” The special committee
preparing the Mississippi code conceded that some of the proposed legisla¬
tion "may seem rigid and stringent” but only "to the sickly modern human¬
itarians .” 76

To the former slaves, whose opinions carried little weight, the Codes
clouded the entire issue of freedom and left them highly dubious of what
rights if any they could exercise without fear of arrest or legal harassment.
In petitioning the governor, the fr eedmen of Claiborne County, Mississippi,
thought it necessary to ask for a clarification: "Mississippi has abolished
slavery. Does she mean it or is it a policy for the present?” By barring them
from leasing or renting land, the petitioners charged that the legislature
had left them with no choice but to purchase land, knowing full well that
"not one of us out of a thousand” could afford the price of even a quarter
of an acre. If any of them deserted an employer because of cruel treatment,
they could be arrested and forcibly returned to him. How could this be
reconciled with their newly won freedom? "Now we are free,” they insisted,
"we do not want to be hunted by negro runners and their hounds unlftgg
we are guilty of a criminal crime.” To read the daily newspapers, the
petitioners asserted, was to learn only of "our faults” rather tha n of the
many blacks who worked to enrich the very people seeking to circumscribe
their liberties. Who made possible the comforts of the planter class if not
hard-working black men and women?

If every one of us colored people were removed from the state of Missis¬
sippi our superiors would soon find out who were their supporters. We the

laborers have enriched them and it is as much impossible for them to live

with out us as it is for we to be removed from them.

The petitioners assured the governor of their willingness to work for any¬
one who treated them well and paid them adequately; they reminded him,
too, of how the slaves had stood by their white families in troublesome
times. Although they recognized the presence of some "good and honest”
employers among the whites, such men were "not the majority” and the
"good” employer could be easily intimidated and "put down as a negro
spoiler.” Finally, the petitioners thought Jefferson Davis, a fellow Missis-
sippian, should be set free, if only because "we [know] worse Masters than
he was. Altho he tried hard to keep us all slaves we forgive him .” 77

But even as black petitioners and conventions condemned the Black
Codes, or appealed for an amelioration of the laws, few expected a receptive
audience among the planters and white farmers who controlled the legisla¬
tive and executive branches of the new southern governments. After all,
a black editor in Charleston observed of the "Colored Code” in his state, "it
expresses an average of the justice and humanity which the late slavehold¬
ers possess.” But if "the right will prevail and truth triumph in the end,”

370

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

as this editor firmly believed, most blacks came to look to the halls of
Congress rather than to the state capitol for relief. If southern whites could
easily dismiss the pleas of black meetings and politically powerless black
leaders, they could not afford to ignore the way in which the black newspa¬
per in Georgia chose to frame its editorial attack on the Black Codes: "Such
legislation can but tend to keep the State out of the Union, retain troops
in our houses and public buildings, and increase taxation to maintain a
large standing army.” 78

The Black Codes proved to be short-lived, largely because the South
VmH moved precipitately, impetuously, and carelessly. Although Federal
officials, both in the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Union Army, had imple¬
mented labor policies which were strikingly similar, the Codes were
deemed too blatantly discriminatory and overly repressive. Not long after
the Codes were adopted, Federal officials ordered many of them suspended,
nearly always on the grounds that freedmen should be subject to the same
regulations, penalties, punishments, and courts as whites. Several of the
state legislatures, too, had second thoughts about their actions, particu¬
larly after the initial insurrection panic subsided and the labor situation
improved; the legislators themselves repealed or revised some of the more
obnoxious clauses, and the Codes passed by a number of states in 1866
proved less harsh. 78

Despite Federal and court orders suspending their operation, the
Codes were nonetheless enforced in regions where Freedmen’s Bureau
officials refused to intervene and where blacks found it difficult to appeal
local decisions. Since some of the new laws, moreover, theoretically applied
to both races, they were permitted to stand, with local authorities deciding
how and when to enforce them. The most obvious example was the va¬
grancy law; although largely enforced against blacks, authorities could if
they chose enforce it against whites. The mayor of Aberdeen, Mississippi,
rounded up hundreds of freedmen in early 1866, gave them a few hours to
contract with an employer for the year, and put the others to work sweep¬
ing the city streets. The local ordinances in Louisiana "still hold good in
many parishes,” the New Orleans Tribune charged, despite a War Depart¬
ment order countermanding them; however, the ordinances were no longer
published in the local newspapers and thus had to be "carried on in the
dark.” When dealing with blacks under contract who left their employers,
both local and Federal officials could be expected to act within the spirit
and provisions of the Codes. The appearance in a Mississippi newspaper of
an advertisement asking for the apprehension of a runaway laborer, com¬
plete with a description and sketch of the culprit, stirred old memories. "It
is positively refreshing to look at it,” one editor remarked. No less familiar,
a black man in Natchez served a jail sentence for harboring and feeding
an apprentice who had run away from "a most estimable lady.” 80

If the Codes were dead, the sentiment which had created them was still
very much alive. Whether enforced, set aside, or amended, the Black Codes
had revealed how the ruling class expected to perpetuate that rule. The

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

371

setback, then, could be viewed as but temporary, a concession to expedi¬
ency. If statutes proved unavailing in returning the ex-slaves to the fields
and kitchens where they belonged, economic necessity and the enforce¬
ment of contracts could achieve the same goals within an ideological frame¬
work familiar and acceptable to the North. Neither during slavery days nor
in the immediate postwar years, moreover, did the planter rely entirely on
legislative enactments to maintain the order and discipline he deemed
essential. When it came to managing blacks, experience taught him that
the place to establish his authority was in the field and the kitchen, not
simply in the courthouse.

Faced with troublesome laborers after the war, a Louisiana sugar planter
mused over the changed situation and how he would have dealt with such
problems in better days. "Eaton [an overseer] must find it very hard to lay
aside the old strap—-As for myself, I would give a good deal to amuse myself
with it, a little while. I have come to the conclusion that the great secret
of our success was the great motive power contained in that little instru¬
ment.” Few of the former slaveholders would have disputed that observa¬
tion. To maintain a disciplined and docile labor force, they had long
acknowledged their reliance on "the power of fear.” Nor had the emancipa¬
tion of the slaves lessened the need to exercise their traditional preroga¬
tives. "They can’t be governed except with the whip,” one planter
explained. "Now on my plantation there wasn’t much whipping, say once
a fortnight; but the negroes knew they would be whipped if they didn’t
behave themselves, and the fear of the lash kept them in good order.” 81

When Federal officials suspended the newly enacted Black Codes,
southern whites greeted the decision with predictable expressions of dis¬
may but few were altogether surprised and some felt the states had acted
foolishly. But when Federals in some regions reprimanded employers for
using the whip on black laborers or forbade any kind of corporal punish¬
ment, that was truly hard to accept—even to comprehend. "I know the
nigger,” a Mississippi planter pleaded with a Freedmen’s Bureau official.
"The employer must have some sort of punishment. I don’t care what it is.
If you’ll let me tie him up by the thumbs, or keep him on bread and water,
that will do.... All I want is just to have it so that when I get the niggers
on to my place, and the work is begun, they can’t sit down and look me
square in the face and do nothing.” 8 *

To manage black laborers, numerous planters agreed, was not unlike
handling mules; both could be stubborn, even insolent, and experience
suggested that they were most serviceable and contented when they had
"plenty of feed, plenty of work, and a little licking.” What these planters
now demanded was simply the necessary authority to exact the fear and

372

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the deference always considered essential to racial control. Like the Black
Codes, corporal punishment would benefit the blacks by restraining their
worst passions and forcing them to acknowledge authority. A nigger has
got to know you’re his master,” a Georgia planter still insisted, and then
when he understands that he’s content.” Still another former slaveholder
attributed his postwar success in managing thirty-five freedmen to their
fear of punishment: "You see I never let myself down to ’em.” 83

If the old discipline in any way contradicted the new freedom, few of
the former slaveholders cared to admit it. To them, emancipation had only
made more urgent the need to exercise traditional authority. Although
employers made less use of the whip than before the war, they managed
to find equally effective and less controversial alternatives. After serving
a fifteen-day jail sentence for lashing a former slave ("was there ever such
a damned outrage!”), a South Carolina planter claimed to have "lamt a
trick” that exacted the proper respect of his blacks. "I jest strings ’em up
by the thumbs for ’bout half an hour, an’ then they are damned glad to go
to work.” Since the Union Army used that method to discipline its own men
as well as recalcitrant blacks, the South Carolinian obviously expected no
interference. Fearful of whipping their freed slaves, lest they lodge a com¬
plaint with Federal officials, some planters took out their frustrations in
verbal abuse. "Can’t lick free niggers, but I don’t know if there’s any law
ag’in cussin’ ’em, and I believe it does ’em a heap o’ good,” a Georgian
suggested to a group of fellow planters. "It’s next best to lickin’. Jest cuss
one o’ ’em right smart for ’bout five minutes, and he’ll play off peart.”
Unfortunately for this planter, emancipation had left him without a black
to curse and he could only fantasize about how to bring the freedmen under
control. "I should like to lick a hundred free negroes jest once all ’round.
If I didn’t bring ’em to know their places. I’d pay ten dollars apiece for all
I failed on.” 84

The degree to which emancipation altered the day-to-day behavior and
temperament of the former slaveholder became a matter of immediate
concern to black men and women. On numerous farms and plantations,
they soon discovered that the potential of the white family for volatile
behavior had in no way been abated and it seemed like the old times again.
Katie Darling, a former Texas slave, remembered staying with her "white
folks” for six years after the war "and missy whip me jist like she did ’fore.”
If Anna Miller perceived any change in her master after emancipation, it
was only his rapid mental deterioration. "De marster gets worser in de
disposition and goes ’roun’ sort of talkin’ to hisse’f and den he gits to cussin
ev’rybody.” Within a year after vowing that he would not live in a country
"whar de niggers am free,” her master killed himself. 85

The previous behavior of their masters, as many ex-slaves suddenly
discovered, often proved an unreliable guide to how they would now con¬
duct themselves and manage their freed blacks. Frank Fikes, for example,
claimed to have suffered few hardships or beatings as a slave. "Old miss and
mars was not mean to us at all until after surrender and we were freed.

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

373

We did not have a hard time until after we were freed. They got mad at
us because we was free...” Nor were some of the former masters oblivious
to how emancipation could work curious changes in their attitudes and
temperament. When he had held slaves, a South Carolina planter recalled,
he had always thought of himself as a model master and only once had he
resorted to whipping one of his blacks. But now, in his relations with these
same people as freedmen and freedwomen, he found himself increasingly
moody and temperamental. On one occasion, he misinterpreted what a
former slave told him and had to be restrained by several friends who were
present from shooting the man on the spot; instead, he calmed himself by
administering 130 lashes to him, "hard as I could lay on.” But if the
whipping relieved this planter of his anger, it also left him displeased with
his loss of self-control. "I was wrong, I know, but I was in a passion. That’s
the way we treat our servants, and shall treat them, until we can get used
to the new order of things,—if we ever can.” 86

Although Federal officials were inclined to overlook how an employer
chose to discipline his laborers, the blacks themselves refused to be passive
spectators. If a planter relied on the old discipline, confident that fear and
punishment could still maintain a captive labor force, he might discover
that his intended victims, often his former slaves, no longer felt compelled
to submit. After what they had endured as slaves, they saw no reason to
tolerate such treatment as freedmen. "Damn him,” a South Carolina black
remarked after an altercation with his old master, "he never done nufin
all his damned life but beat me and kick me and knock me down; an’ I hopes
I git eben with him some day.” In Mississippi, an overseer who responded
to a disobedient field hand by threatening him with an ax suddenly found
himself facing the laborer’s daughter and several other blacks, all of them
holding axes. "I had to run for my life,” the overseer testified. On the
Brokenburn plantation in Louisiana, John B. Stone, the highly tempera¬
mental son of the mistress, shot a black youth after an argument in the
fields. That so infuriated the other hands that they turned upon Stone and
might have killed him had not some others intervened. Still, Kate Stone
would never forget the sight of her brother being escorted to the house by
"a howling, cursing mob with the women shrieking, 'Kill him!’ and all
brandishing pistols and guns.” The family thought it best to send John
away to school, at least until a semblance of calm had been restored. Upon
his return, he seemed a much-changed and subdued young man. "He never
speaks now of killing people as he formerly had a habit of doing,” his sister
wrote of him. 87

If open resistance invited severe reprisals, the freedmen could exercise
the power to withhold their labor or leave the premises and never return.
The ties that kept former slaves on the plantation were often so tenuous
that an employer’s threat or attempt to inflict punishment might end the
relationship altogether. Faced with the imminent loss of their laborers,
many a former master and mistress suddenly became "very con’scending”
after the war, learned to address their blacks in terms of respect, and

374

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

banished both the whip and the overseer. "I told my overseer the old style
wouldn’t do,—the niggers wouldn’t stand it,—and he promised better fash¬
ions,” an Alabama planter remarked; "but it wasn’t two days before he fell
from grace, and went to whipping again. That just raised the Old Scratch
with them; and I don’t blame ’em.” In explaining the changed attitudes of
their old masters, some former slaves suggested that fear itself could have
been a motivating factor. "He never was mean to us after freedom,” a
former Tennessee slave recalled, along with the many beatings she had
once endured. "He was ’fraid the niggers might kill him.” Rather than
trust their former master to exercise proper judgment, many blacks ex¬
tracted from him, as a condition of employment, assurances that he would
refrain from corporal punishment and discharge the overseer. 88

By these and other demands, the freedmen suggested the need not only
to abolish the relics of bondage but to give substance to their position as
free workers, with the same rights and prerogatives they had observed
white laborers exercising. Nowhere would they manifest this determina¬
tion more vividly than in the new economic arrangements they worked out
with their employers. Unfortunately, the former slaveholding class seemed
in many respects less equipped to make the transition to freedom than
their former slaves. No matter how hard some tried, few of them were
capable of learning new ways and shaking off the old attitudes. Even if they
could, they found themselves increasingly trapped into an untenable posi¬
tion. Desperately needing to exact enough labor from their former slaves
to meet a brutally depressed market, employers now encountered free
workers who looked first to their own subsistence and refused to work up
to an exploitative level they deemed incompatible with their new status.
When these conflicting needs created an impasse, as they often did, the
employer class was forced to look elsewhere for the kind of compulsion and
guidance that might once again produce a stable and tractable labor force.
How ironic that none other than the much-hated Yankee conquerors
should have ultimately shown them the way.

Not long after Federal authorities set aside the Black Code of South
Carolina, Armisted Burt, who had helped to frame the new laws, noted
with obvious satisfaction that the Union commander had ordered freedmen
to contract with an employer or be sentenced to hard labor on public
projects. "I have no doubt the Yankees will manage them,” he concluded.
The confidence he expressed was not misplaced. No matter how much
whites chafed under military rule and occupation, the planter class—na¬
tive whites and northern lessees alike—often acknowledged its indebted¬
ness to the Union Army for controlling the otherwise restless and
rebellious dispositions of the freed slaves. After conversing with the local

375

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

commander on steps that had been taken to suppress a feared black upris-
ing, the manager of a plantation in low-country South Carolina breathed
much easier: "Our people object to the troops being sent here. I thank God
they are here.” No sooner were cases of "insubordination” reported to
Federal authorities, a Georgia clergyman and planter informed his sister,
than forceful steps were taken to suppress the troublemakers. "The effect
has been a remarkable quietude and order in all this region. The Negroes
are astounded at the idea of being whipped by Yankees. (But keep all t.hig
a secret, lest we should be deprived of their services. I have not called on
them yet, but may have to do so.)” 88

If the Black Codes had not been the edicts of legislatures dominated
by ex-Confederate leaders, they might not have suffered the fate of nullifi¬
cation. The problem lay not so much in specific provisions as in what the
total product came to symbolize to the victorious North—white southern
intransigence and unrepentance in the face of military defeat. But the
suspension of the Codes in no way diminished the need to reactivate and
control black labor. Almost every Federal official recognized that necessity,
and Union commanders moved quickly to expel former plantation hands
from the towns and cities, to comply with the requests of planters to force
their blacks to work, and to punish freedmen for disobedience, theft, va¬
grancy, and erratic labor. 90 "Their idea of freedom,” the provost
of Bolivar County, Mississippi, said of the recently freed slaves, "is that
they are under no control; can work when they please, and go where they
wish.... It is my desire to apply the Punishments used in the Army of the
United States, for offences of the Negroes, and to make them do their duty.”
Empowered to settle disputes between employers and laborers, the provost
marshals invariably sustained the authority of the planters. In Louisiana,
for example, plantation laborers testified to the hopelessness of appealing
any grievances they might have to the nearest Federal official-

Q. Have you any white friend, in your parish, who will support your
claims or take your defense?

A. We have no white friends there.

Q. Have you any colored friend who could do so?

A. No colored man has any thing to say; none has any influence.

Q. Is not the Provost Marshal a protector for your people?

A. Whenever a new Provost Marshal comes he gives us justice for
a fortnight or so; then he becomes acquainted with planters, takes din¬
ners with them, receives presents; and then we no longer have any rights,
or very little . 91

If Union officers eschewed the whip as an instrument of slavery, they
did not hesitate to employ familiar military punishments to deal with
"disorderly” blacks. "What’s good enough for soldiers is good enough for
Niggers,” a sergeant told a Florida woman who had expressed shock over
seeing her "negligent” servant hung up by the thumbs. Upon witnessing

376

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

a similar punishment meted out to two laborers he had reported for loiter¬
ing on the job, a South Carolina planter heard them plead to be flogged
instead. But if Yankee "justice” dismayed or surprised some native whites,
a Mississippi hotelkeeper marveled at the way the local provost marshal
had dealt with a "sassy” black who refused to work. "We’ve got a Provo’
in our town,” he boasted, "that settles their hash mighty quick. He’s a

downright high-toned man, that Provo’, if he is a Yankee_He tucked

him [the black] up, guv him twenty lashes, and rubbed him down right
smart with salt, for having no visible means of support.” That evening, the
black victim returned quite willingly to his job. 92

Since the early days of occupation, Federal authorities had shared
with planters a concern over how to keep the ex-slaves in the fields and
impress upon them the necessity of labor. "The Yankees preach nothing
but cotton, cotton,” a Sea Islands slave exclaimed, voicing the dismay of
many blacks over how quickly their liberators returned them to the famil¬
iar routines. Soon after the troops occupied a region, Union officers con¬
fronted the problem of what to do with the "contrabands” pouring into
their camps. Although many of them were conscripted for military service
and labor, the vast majority found themselves working on abandoned and
confiscated plantations. The Federal government supervised some of these
plantations, while leasing most of them to private individuals, including a
number of northern whites intent on ma ximiz ing profits as quickly as
possible. Thomas W. Knox, a white Northerner who tried his hand at
plantation management, characterized most of his colleagues in the busi¬
ness as "unprincipled men” who had little regard for the former slave.
"The difference between working for nothing as a slave, and working for
the same wages under the Yankees,” he observed, "was not always percep¬
tible to the unsophisticated negro.” 93 Small numbers of black farmers also
managed to obtain leases, all of them eager to demonstrate the feasibility
of free and independent labor. The most successful of such experiments
took place at Davis Bend, Mississippi, where blacks secured leases on six
extensive plantations, including two belonging to Joe and Jefferson Davis;
the blacks repaid the government for the initial costs, managed their own
affairs, raised and sold their own crops, and realized impressive profits. 94

Whatever the promise of Davis Bend, neither the Union Army nor the
Freedmen’s Bureau thought to question the basic assumption underlying
the discredited Black Codes—that the ex-slaves were fit only to till the land
of others as agricultural laborers and that only compulsion would exact the
necessary work and discipline. The proven success ofblack lessees at Davis
Bend and elsewhere, no matter how widely applauded, failed to stem the
steady drift toward restoration. Even before the termination of the war,
loyal planters and those who took the oath of allegiance to the United
States government were permitted to retain their plantations and to work
the blacks on a wages or shares basis; Federal officials intervened only to
provide planters with the necessary laborers, to suppress any disorders,
and to provide guidelines for the management of the ex-slaves. In the view

377

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

of some Union officers, only if the former master and his former slaves
ap’eed to a separation should the blacks be permitted to leave the planta-
tions on which they had worked. That was how Emma Holmes interpreted
Federal policy in her region, and her mother accordingly reported to the
local Union officer a black man who had taken a job elsewhere: "By yester¬
day morning he had found out the Yankees were his masters, and he
walked back here to his work.” 95

Based on early experiences with the freedmen, the labor system estab¬
lished during the war by successive Union commanders in Louisiana
proved far more typical of the Federal approach than the short-lived Davis
Bend experiment. To meet the problem of growing numbers of black ref
ugees and of plantations disrupted by black defections and erratic labor,
General Nathaniel P. Banks promised to return the ex-slaves to the fields
and to enforce "conditions of continuous and faithful service, respectful
deportment, correct discipline, and perfect subordination on the part of the
negroes.” The regulations he issued manifested precisely that spirit: a
contract system binding the ex-slaves to the land, compensating their labor
with wages or shares, and assuring them of just treatment, adequate ra¬
tions and clothing, medical attention, and education for their children.
Although the freedman could select an employer, he was bound to him for
the remainder of the year, during which time he was expected to perform
"respectful, honest, faithful labor.” To encourage compliance, one half of
his wages would be withheld until the end of the season; any black refusing
to enter into a contract, violating its terms, or found guilty of "indolence,
insolence, and disobedience” would forfeit his pay and be subject to mili¬
tary arrest and employment without wages on public works. Conceding
little else to emancipation, the new rules forbade employers from flogging
their laborers or separating families; in numerous instances, however,
freedmen were returned to their old masters with little concern for their
subsequent treatment. 96

Even if conceived in "a benevolent spirit,” the labor system envisioned
by these regulations struck some black critics as "freedom by toleration”
and a "mitigated bondage” analogous to Russian serfdom. That was how
the New Orleans Tribune, the articulate organ of the free colored commu¬
nity, chose to characterize the new rules. "Strange freedom indeed! Our
freedmen, on the plantations, at the present time, could more properly be
called, mock freedmen.” If a laborer were truly free, the editor observed,
he should be able to choose his place of residence and his trade or occupa¬
tion, negotiate his own terms with an employer (including wages, condi¬
tions, and term of service), and bring court action against anyone who tried
to defraud him; moreover, he should be paid the full value of his labor, not
a wage stipulated by planters’ meetings or Federal rules. Under the cur¬
rent regulations, the editor contended, blacks would have to work for wages
which barely sustained them. But that deplorable fact seemed even less
important than the ways in which the new system perpetuated and en¬
forced the dependency of the freedmen on their former masters:

378

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

He does not wear his own clothes; but, as the slave, he wears his master’s
clothes. He does not eat his own bread, the bread he won by the sweat
of his brow; he eats his master’s bread. He is provided for like the mules
and cattle on the plantations. And it is said that this is the way some
people intend to follow to make men!

Finally, black critics thought it highly ironic but not altogether surprising
that such a labor system should have been instituted and defended by white
men who never ceased to display their abolitionist credentials as evidence
of their good faith. "I despise a man who pretends to be an abolitionist, and
who is only a deepskin abolitionist,” a black clergyman told a meeting in
New Orleans called to protest the labor regulations. "We have good friends,
who will work with us till this country be a free country; but we have
unfaithful friends also. A wolf came, one day, among sheep, in sheep’s
clothing; but he had a strange foot, and the sheep wondered at that. We,
too, are ready to watch this foot.” 97

In defending the labor system of Louisiana, a Union officer not only
alluded to his "life-time Anti-Slavery” but curtly dismissed the black critics
in New Orleans as "a class of colored people who, with all their admirable
qualities, have not yet forgotten that they were, themselves, slaveholders.”
But if the urban black elitists could be dismissed, Federal authorities would
still have to contend with the black laborers themselves, most of whom had
never read a newspaper and needed no one to remind them of the oppres¬
sive nature of the system under which they were now told to work. The kind
of resistance they undertook varied from mass defections to open revolt;
most of them, however, took out their grievances in the erratic work habits
about which their employers continued to complain. Rather than submit
to the new regulations, the blacks on a plantation south of New Orleans
threw down their tools, vowed they would never work under such terms,
and "left in a body.” In Plaquemines Parish, field hands lodged the familiar
complaint that they had not yet received their share of the previous sea¬
son’s crops; when they then refused to work, a civilian police officer at¬
tempted to arrest the ringleaders, only to find himself "beset upon by at
least twenty—with hoes, shovels and hatchets” and forced to leave.
Whether directed at specific labor regulations or reflecting general condi¬
tions, such outbreaks in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South would re¬
quire the continued intervention of Federal authorities. 98

Neither the charges of black critics nor the resistance of black laborers
effected any significant changes in a labor system calculated to subordinate
black labor to white planters and lessees. The advocates of that system
persisted in the assumption that only coercion and rigid controls could
assure the triumph and vindication of free labor in the South. When in
mid-1863, at General Banks’s request, two abolitionists evaluated the labor
system of Louisiana, they reported with praise that on those plantations
where the regulations had been faithfully implemented, the black laborers
appeared to be "docile, industrious, & quiet.” By 1865, the initial experi-

379

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

ment in labor relations undertaken in Louisiana had evolved into a system
of contracts between laborers and employers not unlike that being in¬
stituted elsewhere in the occupied South under the auspices of Federal
authorities. Although the format and the specific terms might differ, the
nature of the relationship remained essentially the same, as did the role
of the Federal government and the sources of black discontent."

Even as Federal authorities sought to keep the freed slaves on the
plantations under a contract labor system, they were not able to guarantee
to planters the quality of the labor performed. And to the planter class,
caught up in depressed prices and the demands of a free market, that
consideration remained critical. "Every abolitionist of New England be¬
lieves that by thus merely changing slave labor to hireling labor... every¬
thing will work well,” Edmund Ruffin of Virginia said of the newly
instituted labor system in Louisiana. The assumption would be proven
false, he maintained, if only because black workers would "presume on
their new rights of freedom and fail to pass through a necessary "interme¬
diate condition—which would be that of hunger & general privation &
suffering, next to starving.” After all, he noted, "few white laborers, of the
lowest classes, will labor continuously unless under the compulsion of
hunger & suffering of themselves & their familys. Still fewer free negroes
will labor without this compulsion.” Rather than view the disaster he
predicted for plantation labor, Ruffin chose to put a bullet through his head
several months after Appomattox. But few of his fellow planters chose that
way out of' their dilemma, preferring instead to employ every means at
their disposal to regain control over both the movements and the labor of
their former slaves. 100

With thk knd ofthk war, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Aban¬
doned Lands (commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) undertook to
complete the transition to "free labor” initially begun under the direction
of the Union Army. "The freedmen in a few instances are doing well,”
Thomas Smith reported in November 1865, not long after he had assumed
his post as a Bureau sulwommissioner in charge of northern Mississippi.
He found many of the freedmen to be "indolent,” some of them "disrespect¬
ful and totally unreliable,” and almost all of them "greatly in need of
instruction.” But like most Bureau agents, he thought his primary concern
was not to make literates of the freed slaves but to teach them to be reliable
agricultural lalwrers. "They have very mistaken notions in regard to free¬
dom— They ask, ’What is the value of freedom if one has nothing to go
on?’ That is to say if property in some shape or other is not to be given us,
we might m well be slaves.” He needed to disabuse their minds of such
notions while at the same time restoring their faith in the former masters.

380

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

"The colored people lack confidence in the white man’s integrity; they fear
that, were they to hire to him, and work for him, that he would not pay
them for their labor.... The more quickly, and the more perfectly, that
confidence is restored, the better will it be for all classes.” He could con¬
ceive of no more important task he faced in his new position. 101

If "instruction” could cure the propensity of the ex-slaves toward "in¬
dolence” and "unreliable” labor, the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau
eagerly assumed the role of teachers and disciplinarians. The lessons they
imparted seldom varied and rarely departed from what Union officers and
planters had been telling the slaves since the first days of liberation. "He
would promise them nothing, but their freedom, and freedom means
work,” General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau commissioner, explained to
the freedmen of Austin, Texas, and he offered them, too, the classic maxim
of nineteenth-century employers: "The man who sits about the streets and
smokes, will make nothing.” That very morning, Howard said, he h^d
attended church services in different parts of the city and had heard a black
clergyman and a white clergyman preach the gospel of love. "Oh, if you will
only practice what you preach,” the commissioner told the freedmen, "it
will all be well.” But if they refused to work, a Bureau officer warned the
blacks of Mississippi, they should expect neither sympathy, love, nor sub¬
sistence. "Your houses and lands belong to the white people, and you
cannot expect that they will allow you to live on them in idleness.” Nor
should the ex-slave expect the state or Federal government "to let
any man lie about idle, without property, doing mischief. A vagrant law is
right in principle. I cannot ask the civil officers to leave you idle, to beg
or steal. If they find any of you without business and means of liv ing , they
will do right if they treat you as bad persons and take away your misused
liberty.” 102

Upon assuming office, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent seized every
opportunity to preach the gospel of work to the blacks in his district, often
visiting the plantations themselves at the invitation of the grateful proprie¬
tors. In addressing the assembled laborers, he would familiarize them with
their "duties and obligations,” seek to correct their "exaggerated ideas” of
freedom, impress upon them the need to be "orderly, respectful, and indus¬
trious, and assure them of protection and compensation "commensurate
with their industry and demeanor.” At the same time. Bureau commission¬
ers implored the freedmen, in words that would become all too familiar, to
exhibit those traditional virtues of patience and forbearance, no matter
what the provocation.

Your freedom will expose you to some new troubles. Bad men will take
advantage of your ignorance and impose upon you. Some will try to
defraud you of your wages, and a few may be wicked and cowardly
enough to revenge their losses upon you by violence. But let none of these
things provoke you to evil deeds. It is better to suffer wrong than to do
wrong.

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

381

No doubt many Bureau agents took comfort in the impact of their message.
"The Negro is often suspicious of his former master and will not believe
him,” the subcommissioner in Jackson, Mississippi, observed, "but when
assured by the Federal authorities that he must go to work and behave
himself, he does so contentedly.” That made it all the more imperative, he
thought, "for the good of the Negro and the peace of the Country,” to have
Bureau representatives visit every part of their districts . 103 The manager
of a plantation in Bolivar County, Mississippi, heartily agreed. "If you
would send an agent here to look into matters, and give some advice, I
would be pleased to have him make his quarters with me for a week or
two.” With unconcealed enthusiasm, a planter near Columbia, South
Carolina, welcomed the advice a Bureau official gave to his laborers.
"You’re their best friend, they all know,” he told him, "and Fm very glad
you’ve come down this way.” The planter had good reason to be grateful.
Until the official’s visit, the freedmen had thought they owned the planta¬
tion . 104

Acting in what they deemed to be the best interests of the ex-slaves,
the strongest and proven advocates of the freedmen’s cause admonished
them to prove their fitness for freedom by laboring as faithfully as they had
as slaves—and even more productively. "Plough and plant, dig and hoe, cut
and gather in the harvest,” General Rufus Saxton urged them. "Let it be
seen that where in slavery there was raised a blade of corn or a pound of
cotton, in freedom there will be two.” Along with Saxton, few whites were
more committed to the freedmen than Clinton B. Fisk, a Bureau official
who subsequently helped to found one of the first black colleges. And he
doubtless thought himself to be speaking in their best interests when he
advised the freedmen to remain in their old places and work for their
former masters.

You have been associated with them for many years; you are bound to
the old home by many ties, and most of you I trust will be able to get on
as well with your late masters as with anyone else.... He is not able to
do without you, and you will, in most cases, find him as kind, honest, and
liberal as other men. Indeed he has for you a kind of family affection....
Do not think that, in order to be free, you must fall out with your old
master, gather up your bundles and trudge off to a strange city. This is
a great mistake. As a general rule, you can be as free and as happy in
your old home, for the present, as any where else in the world . 105

Consistent with such advice, Freedmen’s Bureau officials made every effort
to rid the urban centers of black refugees and to force them back onto the
plantations. (Ironically, the very presence of the Bureau in the towns and
villages had induced many ex-slaves to settle there, thinking they might
be more secure with Federal protection nearby.) A successful Bureau offi¬
cer in Culpeper, Virginia, was able to report that "this village was overrun
with freedmen when I took charge here, but I have succeeded in getting the

382

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

most of them out into the country on farms. The freedmen are, almost
without an exception, going to work, most of them by the year.” 106

Having been established to facilitate the transition from slavery to
freedom, the Bureau faced an admittedly immense task. With limited per¬
sonnel and funds, it was forced to operate on a number of levels, providing
the newly freed slaves with food rations and medical care, assisting them
in their education, helping to reunite families, relocating thousands of
ex-slaves on abandoned lands, and transporting still more to areas where
the scarcity of labor commanded higher wages. In its most critical role as
a labor mediator, the Bureau set out to correct abuses in contracts, estab¬
lish "fair” wage rates, force employers to pay what they had promised, and
break up planter conspiracies to depress wages. "What we wish to do is
plain enough,” a Bureau officer in North Carolina announced. "We desire
to instruct the colored people of the South, to lift them up from subservi¬
ency and helplessness into a dignified independence and citizenship.” 107

The attempts to implement these policies and lofty objectives revealed
varying ranges of competence and dedication within the Bureau’s person¬
nel. In theory, a northern reporter wrote, the Bureau unquestionably
"stands as the next friend of the blacks,” but "practically, and in the
custom of the country,” he concluded after several months of observation,
"it appears to stand too often as their next enemy.” The agent he met in
a South Carolina community typified for him the Bureau mentality. Em¬
powered to examine labor contracts and determine the validity of planter
and freedmen grievances, he demonstrated little or no sympathy for the
very people he had been dispatched to protect. "He doesn’t really intend
to outrage the rights of the negroes, but he has very little idea that they
have any rights except such as the planters choose to give them.” Henry
M. Turner, the prominent black clergyman, shared this dim view of the
Bureau in operation. Based upon his travels in Georgia and his conversa¬
tions with numerous freedmen, Turner concluded that although Bureau
agents professed "to do much good,” many of them appeared to be "great
tyrants” who were utterly incapable of understanding the problems of his
people. 108

Whatever directives flowed out of the national office, the crucial power
of the Freedmen’s Bureau rested with the state and local officials, many of
whom were former soldiers and officers who looked upon their positions as
sinecures rather than opportunities to protect the ex-slaves in their newly
acquired rights. The competence of individual agents varied enormously,
as did the quality of the commitment they brought to their jobs. Under
difficult, even hazardous circumstances, some Bureau agents braved the
opposition of native whites as well as Federal authorities to protect the
freedmen from fraud, harassment, and violence; among these agents were
whites imbued with the old abolitionist commitment and a small group of
blacks, including Martin R. Delany, B. F. Randolph, and J. J. Wright, all
of them holding posts in South Carolina. 109 But many of the field agents
of the Freedmen’s Bureau coveted acceptance by the communities in which

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

383

they served and became malleable instruments in the hands of the planter
class, eager to service their labor needs and sharing similar views about the
racial character and capacity ofblack people and the urgent need to control
them. The New Orleans Tribune tried to be as sympathetic toward the
Freedmen’s Bureau as its observations would permit: in the midst of a
hostile population, the agents had little choice but to act cautiously; their
acquaintances were almost always whites and each day they were sub¬
jected to "false impressions and misrepresentations.” Under such condi¬
tions, the editor charged, the legitimate grievances ofblack laborers were
understandably "treated with contempt”—that is, if they were considered
at all. In a recent visit to Amite City, in St. Helena Parish, he found that
most of the blacks were unaware of the presence of the Bureau. "The
representatives of the federal power are lost in the crowd,” the editor
observed; "and feeling themselves powerless, they are wasting time the
best they can, and do not hurt the feelings of any body.” To "make Aboli¬
tion a truth,” he suggested that black troops be stationed there. "Up to this
time, Emancipation has only been a lie—in most of our parishes.” 110

No matter how a Bureau agent interpreted his mission, the tasks he
faced were formidable. At the very outset, the extent of territory for which
he was responsible reduced his effectiveness. "My satrapy,” a South
Carolina agent recalled, "contained two state districts or counties, and
eventually three, with a population of about eighty thousand souls and an
area at least two thirds as large as the state of Connecticut. Consider the
absurdity of expecting one man to patrol three thousand miles and make
personal visitations to thirty thousand Negroes.” The questions an agent
needed to answer and act upon were equally demanding. If a slaveholder
had removed his blacks during the war to a "safe” area, who bore the
responsibility for returning them to their original homes? If blacks had
planted crops in the master’s absence, who should reap the profits? Could
a former master confiscate the personal possessions a black had accumu¬
lated as his slave? If a black woman had borne the children of a master,
who assumed responsibility for them in freedom? Could the ex-slaveholders
expel from their plantations the sick and elderly blacks no longer able to
support themselves? Compared to the numerous disputes involving the
interpretation of contracts, the division of crops, and acts of violence, these
were almost trivial questions, but even the best-intentioned agents had few
guidelines to help them reach a decision. The Bureau officer, a South
Carolina agent recalled, needed to be "a man of quick common sense, with
a special faculty for deciding what not to do. His duties and powers were
to a great extent vague, and in general he might be said to do best when
he did least.” 111

No sooner had he taken office than the typical Bureau agent found
himself besieged by planters wanting to know what terms and punish¬
ments they could impose on their blacks. That would constitute the bulk
of his work, along with the many complaints of freedmen who had suffered
fraud, abuse, and violence at the hands of their employers. Unfortunately,

384 BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

few Bureau agents possessed the ability, the patience, or the sympathy to
deal with the grievances of the freedmen, even to recognize their legiti¬
macy, and the ex-slave had no way of knowing what to expect if he should
file a complaint. To do so, he might have to travel anywhere from ten to
fifty miles to the nearest Bureau office, where he was apt to find an agent
"who rides, dines, and drinks champagne with his employer” and viewed
any complainant as some kind of troublemaker. Even the more sympa¬
thetic agents were not always able to consider the freedman’s grievances
with the seriousness they deserved.

The majority of the complaints brought before me came from
Negroes. As would naturally happen to an ignorant race, they were liable
to many impositions, and they saw their grievances with big eyes....

With pomp of manner and of words, with a rotundity of voice and super¬
fluity of detail which would have delighted Cicero, a Negro would so
glorify his little trouble as to give one the impression that humanity had
never before suffered the like . 112

The ways in which a local Bureau agent or provost marshal considered
the grievance of a freedman often differed markedly from the deference
paid to a prominent planter. In Liberty, Virginia, for example, the local
superintendent of freedmen’s affairs—a sergeant in the Union Army—
listened to a black laborer’s account of a severe beating he had suffered at
the hands of his employer.

"What did you do to him? You’ve been sassy?”

'No, boss; never was sassy; never was sassy nigger sence I’se born.”

"Well, I suppose you were lazy.”

"Boss, I been working all de time; ask any nigger on de plantashn ef
I se ever lazy nigger. Me! me and dem oder boys do all de work on de
plantashn same as ’foretime.”

"Well, then, what did he strike you for?”

"Dat jest it, sah. Wot’d he strike me for? Dar ar jest it. I done
nothin’.”

"How many of you are there on the plantation?”

Right smart family on de plantashn, sah. Dunno how many.”

"Did he strike any other boy but you?”

"No, sah, me one.”

"You must have been doing something?”

No, boss; boss, I tell you; Fse in at de quarters, me and two o’dem
boys, and he came in de do’, jump on me wid a stick, say 'he teach me.’ ”

"What did you do then?”

"Run, come yer.”

"Well, now you go back home and go to your work again; don’t be
sassy, don’t be lazy when you’ve got work to do; and I guess he won’t
trouble you .” 113

This freedman fared better than the many blacks who testified that local
agents refused even to listen to their complaints but ordered them back to

Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

385

work and threatened them with deportation. Confronted with an employer
un w illing to pay him his share of the crop and with threats to bum down
his house (because he conducted classes there), a North Carolina freedman
carried his appeal to General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau’s head commis¬
sioner, after the local agent had refused to intercede. 114

Even where a Bureau official tried to act on behalf of a freedman,
he might find himself frustrated by military authorities, whose sup¬
port he needed to enforce his decisions but whose sympathies often
lay with the native whites. In some regions, military officers not con¬
nected with the Bureau collected fees for approving labor contracts and
paid little attention to the provisions. Captain Randolph T. Stoops, the
provost marshal in Columbia, Virginia, readily conceded his lack of con¬
cern in such matters but thought it perfectly justified. “As to the price of
labour I have nothing to do with it. The citizens held a meeting some time
since and made a price to suit themselves.... When Farmers bring the
negro before me to have written agreements between them whatever price
is agreed upon between them I enter on the article and consider them
bound to fulfill the agreement whatever it may be.” Often over the protests
of sympathetic Bureau agents, military authorities permitted employers to
mete out punishments to recalcitrant blacks or imposed their own form of
discipline. That was how Captain Stoops dealt with the problem of blacks
“swar ming the streets” of the town in which he was stationed. "There
being no jail or place of confinement I resorted to the wooden horse and
making them work on the streets. Such punishment I found beneficial for
in a short time I found almost every negro for some distance, had gone to
work and was doing well.... Fright has more to do with it than anything
else.” 115

To keep the freed slaves on the old plantations and to force them into
contracts with an employer doubtless helped a local Bureau official to win
a degree of toleration in an otherwise hostile community. But at the same
time, he easily persuaded himself that he was acting in the best interests
of the freedmen. After all, the Bureau officer in Vicksburg observed, wher¬
ever the freedmen were "submissive and perform the labor they contract
to do in good faith,” the native whites treated them "with kindness.” If the
blacks themselves remained unconvinced of the Bureau’s good intentions,
an official could reason that they had only recently been released from
bondage and were in no position to know what was best for them. The more
the freedmen resisted their advice, the more Bureau officials insisted on it,
justifying their positions by the number of ex-slaves they had induced to
return to work. Upon assuming his post in Jackson, Mississippi, Captain
J. H. Weber found the city "full to overflowing with stragglers from the
plantations.” He immediately ordered the troops under his command to
round up the "stragglers” and put them to work on the city streets.

The result was surprising; it stopped in short order the influx of strag¬
glers, and saved the soldiers the labor of cleaning up the City. The strag¬
glers began to learn, and those coming in learned from them that they

386 BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

could not remain here in idleness—they went back to their homes con¬
tented to go to work again. I have gathered up in this way, more than
three hundred, and as planters and others have called for laborers, I have
turned those thus gathered up over to them ...

With equal satisfaction, a Bureau officer in southern Mississippi boasted
that his "presence and authority,” backed by troops when needed, had
"kept the negroes at work, and in a good state of discipline.” If it had not
been for the Bureau, he added, "I feel confident there would have been an
uprising upon the part of the negroes.” 116

Established to ease the ex-slaves’ transition to freedom, the Freed-
men’s Bureau ultimately facilitated the restoration of black labor to the
control of those who had previously owned them. "They are, in fact, the
planter’s guards, and nothing else,” the New Orleans Tribune concluded,
almost two years after expressing its initial doubts about the Bureau.
"Every person acquainted with the regime of our country parishes knows
what has become of the Bureau’s agencies and the Agents.” The potential
for a different course of action had been present from the outset. Although
the President’s liberal pardon policy necessarily frustrated any radical
redistribution of land, the Freedmen’s Bureau had been in a position to
effect significant changes in labor relations, particularly during the chaotic
aftermath of emancipation. "In my opinion,” a Bureau official wrote from
Meridian, Mississippi, in June 1866, "you could inflict no more severe
punishment on a planter than to take from him the negroes that work the
place. They will do anything, rather than this, that is possible or reason¬
able. They feel their utter helplessness without them to do the work.” But
even the best-intentioned of the commissioners and local agents manifested
their sympathy for the freedmen in curious and contradictory ways, em¬
bracing a paternalism and a contract labor system that could only perpetu¬
ate the economic dependency of the great mass of former slaves. 117

"Philanthropists,” a black newspaper observed in 1865, "are some¬
times a strange class of people; they love their fellow man, but these to be
worthy of their assistance, must be of an inferior kind. We were and still
are oppressed; we are not demoralized criminals.” Nor did black people
need to be reminded to avoid idleness and vagrancy; the repeated warnings,
preached by native whites and Federal authorities alike, were all too remi¬
niscent of the white preacher’s sermons during slavery. After all, the news¬
paper concluded, "the necessity of working is perfectly understood by men
who have worked all their lives.” 118

Chapter Eight

BACK TO WORK:
THE NEW DEPENDENCY

"Now children, you don't think white people are any better than you
because they have straight hair and white faces?"

"No, sir.”

"No, they are no better, but they are different, they possess great
power, they formed this great government, they control this vast coun¬
try.... Now what makes them different from you?"

"MONEY. " (Unanimous shout)

"Yes, but what enabled them to obtain i£?How did they get money?"

"Got it off us, stole it off we all!"

—FREEDMEN SCHOOL, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, 1866 1

You know it is better to work for Mr. Cash than Mr. Lash. A black man
looks better now to the white than he used to do. He looks taller, brighter,
and more like a man. The more money you make, the lighter your skin
will be. The more land and houses you get, the straighter your hair will
be.

—REV, HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET,

AT THE CENTER STREET METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1865 a

O n A plantation in South Carolina, an elderly black woman known as
Aunt Phillis told how her master had built his new house only a year
before the outbreak of the Civil War. Like those slaves who habitually
boasted of the wealth of their ''white folks,” she dwelled on the fact that
her master had paid a great deal of money for this house, as much as
$20,000. "Where did your master get so much money?” a northern journal¬
ist asked the old woman. The question obviously agitated her. Although
confined to bed because of an illness, she managed to raise herself up and
with considerable excitement in her voice she kept repeating the question:
"Whar he git he money? Whar he git he money? Is dat what you ask—whar
he git he money? I show you, massa.” Pushing up her sleeve, she revealed
a gaunt, skinny arm. Tapping it vigorously with her forefinger, she ex¬
claimed, "You see dat, massa? Bat’s whar he got he money—out o’ dat black
skin he got he money.” 3

388 BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Few ex-slaveholders ever paused to scrutinize their own lives and
dependency, and still fewer would have perceived any reason to do so. But
their former slaves had been quite observant, and no one knew their "white
folks” better than they did. "Oh, massa ain’t old as me,” an elderly black
woman explained. "Us been playfellows togedder. But massa ain’t stan’
lika me, ma’am. Hard work an’ beatin’ about make us grow ole too fast. Us
been ole w’en him young. Massa lib soft w’en us lib hard.” Wherever the
freedmen turned, it seemed, white men who claimed to be their best friends
and emancipators were on hand to advise them to work diligently and
thereby prove themselves fit for freedom. The former slaves usually lis¬
tened politely and nodded their heads in acquiescence. But occasionally
their anger surfaced, and few charges infuriated them more than that of
idleness, particularly when their former masters leveled the accusation.
"They take all our labor for their own use and get rich on it and then say
we are lazy and can’t take care of ourselves,” was the way a South Carolina
freedman expressed his rage. Why should the ex-slave have to prove him¬
self, others asked, when the evidence of his labor was everywhere to be
seen? Indeed, if the freedman needed only to work to prove himself fit to
enjoy the blessings of liberty, he should have been free for more than two
centuries. After observing how "the flippant class that talks so loud
of the idleness of the negro” finds itself unable to do anything without him ;
the New Orleans Tribune reminded the planters: "The time has come
when the cash, and not the lash commands labor. The blacks are no
longer required to rise at four and work, work, work all day, till it is too
dark to see; and then get up frequently during the night to wait upon the
caprices of an indolent master or mistress to whom surfeiting forbids
sleep.” 4

Having been exposed to regular dosages of advice from white men,
more than five hundred freedmen on St. Helena Island, South Carolina,
listened with particular attentiveness when Major Martin R. Delany, the
outspoken black nationalist and abolitionist who returned to his native
South as a Freedmen’s Bureau officer, addressed them in the s umm er 0 f
1865. "I want to tell you one thing,” he began. "Do you know that if it was
not for the black man this war never would have been brought to a close
with success to the Union, and the liberty of your race? I want you to
understand that. Do you know it? Do you know it? Do you know it?” Cries
of "yes,” “yes,” "yes,” greeted his question. With the crowd obviously in his
grasp, shouting out their encouragement and approval, Delany assailed the
southern planters and northern speculators who exploited their labor, and
he urged them to be skeptical even of those who claimed to be their best
friends—the schoolteachers and ministers, "because they never tell you
the truth,” and the cotton agents, "who come honey mouthed unto you,
their only intent being to make profit by your inexperience.” With even
greater forcefulness, however, Delany reminded his audience of the heri¬
tage of bondage, the white man’s indebtedness to their labor, and the power
they held in their hands.

Back to Work: The New Dependency

389

People say that you are too lazy to work, that you have not the
intelligence to get on for yourselves. They have often told you, Sam, you
lazy nigger, you don’t earn your salt.... He never earned a single dollar
in his life. You men and women, every one of you around me, made
thousands and thousands of dollars. Only you were the means for your
master to lead the idle and inglorious life, and to give his children the
education which he denied to you for fear you may awake to conscience.
If I look around me, I tell you, all the houses on this Island and in
Beaufort, they are all familiar to my eye, they are the same structures
which I have met with in Africa. They have all been made by the Negroes,
you can see it by their rude exterior. I tell you they (White men) cannot
teach you anything, and they could not make them because they have not
the brain to do it....

Now I look around me and I notice a man, bare footed covered with
rags and dirt. Now I ask, what is that man doing, for whom is he working.
I hear that he works for 30 cents a day. I tell you that must not be. That
would be cursed slavery over again.... I tell you slavery is over, and shall
never return again. We have now 200,000 of our men well drilled in arms
and used to warfare, and I tell you it is with you and them that slavery
shall not come back again, and if you are determined it will not return
again.

The few local whites who were present, according to one witness, listened
to Delany "with horror depicted in their faces.” No less alarmed were two
Freedmen’s Bureau officers who had been dispatched to the scene to impart
their impressions of this most recent addition to their ranks. If Delany’s
words disturbed them, the crowd’s reaction seemed even more portentous.
"The excitement with the congregation was immense,” one officer noted,
"groups were formed talking over what they have heard, and ever and anon
cheers were given to some particular sentences of the speech”; he over¬
heard one freedman remark that Delany was "the only man who ever told
them the truth,” while others vowed "they would get rid of the Yankee
employer.” Little wonder that the officers dutifully reported the contents
of Delany’s speech to their superior with a warning that such "discourse”
produced "discontent among the Freedmen,” generated "feelings of indig¬
nation toward the white people,” and could only incite the ex-slaves to
insurrection. "My opinion of the whole affair,” one of them concluded, "is,
that Major Delany is a thorough hater of the White race, and tries the
colored people unnecessarily.” 5

To judge the freedmen by their actions, on St. Helena Island and
elsewhere in the South, Martin Delany had articulated feelings that were
only beginning to surface in the negotiations over the terms of free labor.
Neither Delany nor the host of Bureau officers and missionaries who had
descended upon the South were in any real position to do for the freedman
what he would have to do for himself—that is, work out some kind of
arrangement with the former masters that would be commensurate with
his new legal status and his aspirations. Even with the presence of Federal

390

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

authorities, whose attitudes varied enormously, the ultimate settlement—
barring any redistribution of land—would have to be made between those
who worked and those who owned the land and the tools. And, as a black
newspaper in Georgia observed, "no man loves work naturally. Interest or
necessity induces him to labor. If the laborer has no inducement to be
faithful, he should not be censured for neglect.... Why does the white man
labor? That he may acquire property and the means of purchasing the
comforts and luxuries of life. The colored man will labor for the same
reason.” 6

Actually, despite the gloomy talk and predictions, there was never
really any question about whether the freedmen would work. Unlike many
of their former masters, they had never known anything but work, and
most of them did not view this as a question at all. From the moment of
their emancipation, the bulk of the ex-slave population had little choice but
to labor for old and new employers under a variety of arrangements. Some
of the very planters who forecast the Negro’s doom were successfully using
free black labor; indeed, a Virginia planter seemed stunned and almost
indignant that his blacks were working with a diligence they had denied
him when they were his slaves. The son of a former slaveholder on the Sea
Islands made the same observation when he returned in 1863 and began
to cultivate the plantation with the newly freed blacks. The acknowledg¬
ment of their freedom and the promise of compensation appeared to be
sufficient inducement.

I never knew, during forty years of plantation life, so little sickness.
Formerly, every man had a fever of some kind; and now the veriest old
cripple, who did nothing under secesh rule, will row a boat three nights
in succession to Edisto, or will pick up the com about the corn-house.
There are twenty people whom I know who were considered worn out and
too old to work under the slave system, who are now working cotton, as
well as their two acres of provisions; and their crops look very well. I have
an old woman who has taken six tasks (that is, an acre and a half) of
cotton, and last year she would do nothing. 7

Although obviously searching for evidence of black industry, sympa¬
thetic northern observers did not have to fabricate their reports. The evi¬
dence was all around them, not only in the fields but in the towns and cities,
where blacks were most prominently employed in the reconstruction of a
war-ravaged South. Watching the rebuilding of the burned-out district of
Richmond, a traveler came away impressed with the fact that black men
comprised a majority of the workers. "They drove the teams, made the
mortar, carried the hods, excavated the old cellars or dug new ones, and,
sitting down amid the ruins, broke the mortar from the old bricks and put
them up in neat piles ready for use. There were also colored masons and
carpenters employed on the new buildings.” And yet, he reflected, despite
such scenes, "I was once more informed by a cynical citizen that the negro,
now that he was free, would rob, steal, or starve, before he would work.” 8

Back to Work: The New Dependency

391

If the Negro existed only to make cotton, sugar, and rice, as so many
whites professed to believe, that would have sentenced to immediate obliv¬
ion thousands of skilled black workers and artisans, as well as the far
larger number of menial laborers who performed the arduous tasks
shunned by white people. In the skilled trades, the principal questions
revolved not around the black man’s willingness to work or his ability but
how much longer he would be permitted to compete with white artisans
and mechanics and the degree to which his compensation permitted him
to support himself. "By de time I pays ten dollars a month rent fo’ my
house, an’ fifteen cents a poun’ for beef or fresh po’k, or thirty cents fo’
bacon, an’ den buys my clo’es, I doesn’t hab much leff,” a hod carrier in
Selma, Alabama, declared. "I’s done tried it, an’ I knows brack man cant
stan’ dat.” Nor did black workers in a Richmond tobacco factory, engaged
in labor that white men rejected as too difficult, fare much better.

We the Tobacco mechanicks of this city and Manchester is worked to
great disadvantage.... They say we will starve through laziness that is
not so. But it is true we will starve at our present wages. They say we will
steal we can say for ourselves we had rather work for our living, give us
a Chance. We are Compeled to work for them at low wages and pay high
Rents and make $5 per week and sometimes les. And paying $18 or 20
per month Rent. It is impossible to feed ourselves and family—starvation
is Cirten unles a change is brought about.

That constant advice to work or starve, which their white "friends” so
freely imparted, never seemed to anticipate the plight of people who did
little more than work and yet stood on the brink of starvation. "I keeps on
washin for em,” remarked a laundress in Richmond, who spent most of her
day stooped over a washtub, "for if I leave em they’ll never pay me what
they owe me.” 9

On the plantations and farms, where the bulk of black laborers still
resided, the issue was not whether the freedmen would work but rather for
whom, at what rates, and under what conditions, and those were different
questions altogether, requiring answers from a class of Southerners who
had little experience in dealing with such matters. "Can a planter be
expected to treat the laborers under his control in any other way to-day
than he has treated them for the last twenty years?” the New Orleans
Tribune asked. "He and they are the same men, in the same place, bearing
to each other, in all respects, the same apparent relations. No visible
change has passed off between them. The Proclamation of Emancipation
did not invest the slave with a physical sign of freedom. It was a metaphys¬
ical endowment.” 10 But if the relationship between "master” and laborer
remained essentially unaltered by emancipation, so did the mutual de¬
pendency upon which it had always rested, and that raised the most cru¬
cial question of all. Could the former slave transform the white man’s de¬
pendence on him into a formidable weapon with which to expand his
personal autonomy, improve his day-to-day life and his prospects for the

392

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

future, and thereby redefine if not sever altogether the old relationship?
Whatever the degree of success attained toward these ends, the effort itself
marked a significant break with the past.

When William Elliott tried to persuade Jacob to work for him, he ran
into unexpected difficulties. As his slave, Jacob had served him faithfully
over many years, and Elliott, a South Carolina planter, wished not only to
retain a valuable laborer but to have him use his influence to convince the
other blacks to return to work. Before he would agree to terms, however,
Jacob demanded certain concessions—like the right to keep the provisions
he made for himself—that would have lessened his dependency on the old
master. He asked for them, moreover, in consideration of his previous
record of service to the family. To Elliott, that might have suggested a
demand for retroactive compensation, and he viewed the question quite
differently than his former slave. "I told him I thought the obligation lay
the other way. He is eaten up with self-esteem & selfishness/’ 11

If the incident be judged by the content of the postwar debate, William
Elliott clearly had the advantage. Although dispossessed slaveholders
thought themselves entitled to compensation for their losses (President
Lincoln had once proposed it as a way to encourage voluntary emancipa¬
tion), the question of remunerating the slaves for past labor never reached
the level of serious consideration. But if the freedmen were not to be paid
for their work as slaves, and few of them ever pressed the matter, they
could be quite adamant about being paid for any future labor. As slaves,
each of them had borne a price tag; as free men and women, they now felt
entitled to wages or crop shares commensurate with the labor they per¬
formed. To settle for anything less was to compromise their freedom.

During the Civil War, often at the first sighting of Yankee troops,
slaves refused to work without some form of compensation. What a Louisi¬
ana overseer described in 1863 as "a state of mutiny” on a neighboring
plantation proved to be the failure of the blacks to report to the fields one
morning; instead, they appeared before the overseer and insisted they
would no longer work without pay. At the same time, the workers on a
South Carolina plantation turned down the wage offer of their master. ”1
mean to own my own manhood,” one of them explained, "and I’m goin’ on
to my own land, just as soon as when I git dis crop in, an’ I don’t desire for
to make any change until den.” Besides, he added, "I’m not goin’ to work
for any man for any such price [25 cents a day].” That was how the others
felt, too, as a fellow laborer quickly indicated: "I won’t work for no Man for
25 cents a day—not dis chile—unless he gib me my rations too!” 12

Even while their legal status remained clouded, newly freed slaves
articulated their dissatisfaction with the past by conditioning any future

Back to Work: The New Dependency

393

labor on the fulfillment of certain immediate demands, such as payment
in good wages (not in worthless Confederate bills), adequate food and cloth¬
ing, additional time off for meals and holidays, and the abolition of gang
labor and the position of overseer. If the employer expected his free labor¬
ers to demonstrate that habitual deference and compliance, he might find
himself deeply disappointed if not at times outraged. Early in 1864, for
example, a planter in Louisiana addressed a group of prospective field
hands in the hope of hiring them. "All listened attentively,” noted a re¬
porter present at the scene, "and there was no stupidity apparent in their
faces. They seemed to hear every adjective.” After listening to the explana¬
tion of terms, the laborers countered with questions which revealed their
most immediate concerns: "When will our wages be paid?” "What clothing
are we to have?” "What land are we allowed?” "Can we keep our pigs?” The
women insisted they would no longer work on Saturdays; the men in¬
dicated their unwillingness to perform any plantation chores on Sunday.
Finally, the planter asked them to raise their hands if they agreed to the
terms. At first, a number of them, including most of the women, refused
to do so, holding out for a five-day week, but they finally assented on
condition they could work less than the full time. 13

The initial give-and-take between planters and laborers in wartime
Louisiana impressed a northern observer for the ways in which the blacks
were rapidly learning their own power and worth. "They have a mine of
strategy,” he reported, "to which the planter sooner or later yields.” He
cited the example of a planter who had hired a new overseer; the choice
proved to be obnoxious to the blacks because of his reputation for wielding
the whip and using abusive language in addressing black women. When a
delegation of field hands demanded the overseer’s dismissal, the planter
refused in the strongest possible language. After vowing that he would hire
anyone he chose to be overseer, he ordered the hands back to work. Rather
than return to the fields, however, the blacks went to their cabins, packed
up their belongings, and started down the road; they had not gone far
before the owner called them back and promised them a voice in the
selection of a new overseer. 14

If the South wanted some indication of what it might expect from the
new labor relations, there was also that unique experiment on the Sea
Islands off the coast of South Carolina, where the freed slaves and a select
group of largely northern employers tried to make a success out of cotton
cultivation by free black labor. Not long after the Federal occupation, and
still quite early in the war, a Sea Islands black made clear the prevailing
sentiment about returning to work: "I craves work, ma’am, if I gets a little
pay, but if we don’t gets pay, we don’t care—don’t care to work.” But even
when compensated for their labor, some of the blacks thought the pay to
be inadequate, particularly in comparison to the profits reaped by their
new employers. And when they resolved to make their feelings known, the
laborers did so with sufficient force and unanimity to alarm those high-
minded missionaries who thought themselves the best friends and emanci-

394

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

pators of this oppressed race. Early in 1864, Harriet Ware recorded the
''injudicious” way in which a group of these "poor, ignorant creatures”
confronted Edward Philbrick, a Boston entrepreneur and a firm believer
in free labor who had obtained extensive acreage on St. Helena Island.

The women came up in a body to complain to Mr. Philbrick about their
pay,—a thing which has never happened before and shows the influence
of very injudicious outside talk, which has poisoned their minds against
their truest friends. The best people were among them, and even old
Grace chief spokeswoman.

Before Philbrick left the islands, he leased out his plantation and tried to
induce the blacks to contract with the new superintendent; instead, the two
men found themselves surrounded by disaffected field hands who were
shouting, "A dollar a task! A dollar a task!”—substantially more than they
had been earning. When Philbrick explained to them how the proceeds of
last year’s crop had been spent in carrying on the current work, they
refused to believe him; one of the blacks, in fact, insisted that "they [the
employers] had been jamming the bills into that big iron cage [Philbrick’s
safe] for six months, and there must be enough in it now to bust it!” Still
refusing to budge, Philbrick opened his door several days later only to
confront a delegation of twenty women. Once again, "old Grace” spoke for
the group:

Fse come to you, sir. [pause] Fse been working fer owner three years, and
made with my chillun two bales cotton last year, two more this year. Fse
a flat-footed pusson and don’t know much, but I knows those two bales
cotton fetch ’nought money, and I don’t see what Fse got for ’em. When
I take my leetle bit money and go to store, buy cloth, find it so dear, dear
Jesus!—the money all gone and leave chillun naked. Some people go out
yonder and plant cotton for theyself. Now they get big pile of money for
they cotton, and leave we people ’way back. That’s what Fse lookin’ on,
Marsa. Then when I come here for buy ’lasses, when Massa Charlie sell
he sell good ’lasses, then when Mister W. sell he stick water in ’em, water
enough . Molasses turn thin, but he charge big price for ’em. Now Fse
done working for such ’greement. Fse done, sir.

But Philbrick remained unmoved, rejected the demands for higher pay,
restated his terms, and told those who found them unacceptable that they
were free to go elsewhere. "I told them, too, that if some of those people who
made so much noise didn’t look out, they would get turned off the place,
just as Venus and her gang got turned off last year.” Before long some of
the women returned to inform him of their decision to remain and accede
to his terms. "The fact is,” Philbrick confided to a friend, "they are trying
to play brag, as such people often will; but they will all go to work in a few
days, I feel sure.” 15

Whether expressed collectively or individually, the threat by former

Back to Work: The New Dependency

395

slaves to make their continued labor contingent on a white employer com¬
plying with their demands was in itself almost unprecedented. The implica¬
tions of such bargaining were certainly not lost on the native whites, some
of whom chose to expel blacks who refused to work '"as usual” or who
deigned to approach them about an agreement. No sooner had Richmond
fallen than the slaves in one household selected a committee of three to
inform their owner that they expected wages for any future services. In¬
furiated at this display of insolence, he ordered them from the room. "Well
I told the whole crew to go to hell, and they left,” he later explained; "its
my opinion they’ll all get there soon enough.” Still recouping from the
shock of emancipation, some employers were in no mood to offer their
newly freed slaves anything more than the usual quarters, provisions, and
clothing, and scores of freedmen did agree to such terms during and imme¬
diately after the war, at least until the current crop had been completed.
But that arrangement failed to satisfy Ann Ulrich, who told her master
"dat since freedom we git a little change”; he responded with a torrent of
"all de low names he could think of 5 and ordered her off the plantation.
Nor was Mary Love satisfied with the new dress her mistress had given her,
along with the promise to feed and house her. "After while I asked her ain’t
she got some money for me, and she say no, ain’t she giving me a good
home? Den I starts to feeling like I ain’t treated right.” Some days later,
without saying "nothing to nobody,” she placed the new dress in a bundle
and headed for the nearest town. "Its ten miles into Bonham, and I gits in
town about daylight. I keeps on being afraid, ’cause I can’t git it out’n my
mind I still belong to Mistress.” 16

Community pressures—both white and black—often inhibited any
early agreement on paid labor. While the status of slavery and the possibil¬
ity of compensation remained unclear, many planters held back, preferring
to dismiss recalcitrant slaves rather than bargain with them. When blacks
in Fredericksburg, Virginia, defected in large numbers and demanded
wages, white residents responded by agreeing among themselves not to
hire their own or other people’s slaves. After one resident broke that pact
and agreed to hire his servants, "the gentlemen of the town” warned him
that he was establishing a dangerous precedent and violating the laws of
Virginia, and that his action would mark him as a traitor to the state. "So
the old man refused to hire them,” a neighbor wrote, "and they all left
him.” Such understandings among whites were a forerunner of postwar
agreements not to tamper with each other’s former slaves and to set maxi¬
mum wage and share rates. But the pressures could work both ways. That
is, blacks who continued to work when others refused to do so were apt to
encounter the hostility of their own people. Thus did a South Carolina
proprietress observe "the faithful few” among her slaves to be "uneasy,”
fearing repercussions from those who had left. "Rius gave his wife (Ellen)
a fearful beating because she came to wait on Aunt Nenna. Those who are
faithful suffer so much from the rebellious ones, and we can do nothing to
nrotect them.” 17

396

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Confronted with the departure of their laborers, growing numbers of
planters would have to face up ultimately to the necessity of reaching some
kind of agreement with them. Late in the war, Henry W. Ravenel, the
introspective South Carolina slaveholder, acknowledged the need to effect
"a radical change” in the labor system. The reason for his decision was
clear enough: "Since Thursday the negroes have not been at work.... The
negroes are on a 'strike’ for terms & until an agreement can be made,
matters will be no better.” His blacks objected to "gang work,” they wanted
no overseer or driver, and they demanded a plot of land "to work for their
own use.” Although anxious to retain their labor, Ravenel, for all his brave
talk about "a radical change,” feared any concessions which would be
"incompatible with discipline & good management. ” While the impasse
continued, he detected a "sullenness” in his laborers "which I dislike to
see,” and he heard that many blacks in the neighborhood, including pre¬
sumably some of his own, were now armed. The house servants belonging
to a Georgia woman determined to test their freedom by suing her for
wages. "A most unwarrantable procedure,” her son-in-law wrote after¬
wards, but he agreed that henceforth "we must pay for services ren¬
dered.” 18

With the acknowledgment of emancipation, most planters gradually
resigned themselves to some form of compensated labor. When the master
assembled his newly freed slaves to inform them of his offer, he might also
use the occasion to remind them of their new responsibilities and to intro¬
duce them to some of the harsher realities of free labor. Thus did a planter
in Lowndes County, Alabama, explain to his blacks the new situation in
which they now found themselves:

Formerly, you were my slaves; you worked for me, and I provided for
you. You had no thought of the morrow, for I thought of that for you. If
you were sick, I had the doctor come to you. When you needed clothes,
clothes were forthcoming; and you never went hungry for lack of meal
and pork. You had little more responsibility than my mules.

But now all that is changed. Being free men, you assume the respon¬
sibilities of free men. You sell me your labor, I pay you money, and with
that money you provide for yourselves. You must look out for your own
clothes and food, and the wants of your children. If I advance these things
for you, I shall charge them to you, for I cannot give them like I once did,
now I pay you wages. Once if you were ugly or lazy, I had you whipped,
and that was the end of it. Now if you are ugly and lazy, your wages will
be paid to others, and you will be turned off, to go about the country with
bundles on your backs, like the miserable low-down niggers you see that
nobody will hire. But if you are well-behaved and industrious, you will
be prosperous and respected and happy.

If only every planter adopted this approach, he assured a northern visitor,
there would be a harmonious transition to free labor. "They all understood
this talk,” he added, "and liked it, and went to work like men on the
strength of it_There’s everything in knowing how to manage them.” 19

397

Bach to Work: The New Dependency

The transition to free labor would seldom be as smooth as this Ala¬
bama planter envisioned. Not only was the situation without any clear
precedent but the sharp divisions of race and class, exacerbated by the
heritage of slavery and wartime memories, were bound to complicate the
new relationship of white employer and black laborer. "I do not like the
negro as well free as I did as a slave,” a Virginian conceded, "for the reason
that there is now between us an antagonism of interest to some extent,
while, before, his interest and mine were identical. Then, I was always
thinking of how I could fix him comfortably. Now, I find myself driving a
hard bargain with him for wages; and I find that sort of feeling suggested
directly by motives of interest coming in between the employer and the
employed.” When the former master came around to compensated labor,
he would have to calculate precisely how much his ex-slaves were worth
to him as free workers. That created some obvious conflicts, with employers
and laborers entertaining different notions of value and both determined
to stand by their estimates. "They have what seem to me to be extravagant
ideas as to what they ought to receive,” a North Carolinian observed, and
scores of planters would register the same complaint. But surely, some
freedmen suggested, they should not be worth any less now than the price
for which their masters had occasionally hired them out as slaves. If the
planter pleaded financial difficulties, as so many did, the freedmen had
only to look out into the fields and calculate the value of the expected crops.
"Massa fust said he find all de famly food and house for our work,” a
Virginia black remarked; "den I think that, as him grow 4,000 bushels
corn, near 10,000 lbs. clover, and odder tings ’sides, he can ’ford to pay me
better dan dat, so I no go with him. Me tell him me worth more, and p’raps
he give me some of crop.” 20

Accustomed to holding the upper hand in all dealings with blacks, the
former slaveholder preferred to make his own decision about compensation
rather than suffer the audaciousness of freedmen who confronted him with
demands or ultimatums. In his region, a Florida farmer and physician
revealed, the planters usually refused to pay "any who demand it” but
several had promised to supply their freedmen with provisions at the end
of the year if they worked faithfully. Even relationships of long standing,
which had survived the war and the first years of emancipation, could fall
apart when the ex-slave raised the question of additional pay. Within that
tightly knit Jones clan of Georgia, for example, Kate had remained "faith¬
ful” to Mary Jones’s daughter while many others defected. Not until late
in 1867 did she assert herself on the wage question: "I wish to tell you if
you will give me twelve dollars per month [an increase of three dollars] I
will stay with you; but if not, I have had good offers and I will find another
place.” Despite the years of loyal, unpaid labor this servant had rendered,
the mistress of the household turned down her request for a raise. When
Kate then left her, the mistress noted that she did so "with a very imperti¬
nent air.” 21

The sheer novelty of free black labor introduced complexities and
nuances into the issues that traditionally separated employers and work-

398

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

ers. The proposed compensation mattered less to some freedmen than what
form it would take (crop shares or cash), when it would be paid (monthly
or after completion of the crop), and the often arbitrary nature of the
employees deductions (for the provisions he supplied and the fines he
levied for negligent work). Of equally vital concern to the freedman might
be the kinds of crops he could now grow (the old staples or food), the quality
of the provisions he received, the availability of schools for his children, the
right to unrestricted travel, and freedom from verbal and physical abuse.
Inseparable from all these considerations, and for many the most crucial,
was the degree of personal autonomy he could now enjoy. 22 The only way
to keep the ex-slaves on the plantations without compromising their free¬
dom, the New Orleans Tribune boldly suggested, was not simply to compen¬
sate them but to make them full partners in the management and in the
crop yields; freedom implied the abolition of both "slaves” and "masters,”
the "democratization” of the plantations, and the opportunity for blacks to
control their own crops, lands, and lives. Unless "the necessary step” was
taken to free the workingman, the newspaper concluded, emancipation
would remain "a mockery and a sham.” By "the necessary step,” the editor
envisioned the free colored community of New Orleans investing their
money in land and managing that land in partnership with the former
slaves, who would perform the labor. 23

Early in the postwar period, at least, that ultimate question of who
controlled the crops and the lands remained unresolved in the minds of
many freedmen. After noting that planters now intended to pay their
ex-slaves with crop shares, Henry M. Turner, the outspoken black clergy¬
man, refused to applaud their action; instead, he dismissed the proposal as
an "ingenious trickery ... designed to keep the old master fat doing noth¬
ing, making the Yankees believe 'dis old nigga no wants to leave massa,’
and for the purpose of fizzling them out of all their claims upon the real
estate.” Rather than settle for compensation in wages or shares, the freed¬
men in some areas were already insisting that the crops they had planted
in 1865, if not the land itself, rightfully belonged to them. "Some of them,”
wrote the police chief in Duplin County, North Carolina, "are declaring
they intend to have lands, even if they shed blood to obtain them. Some of
them are demanding all of the crop they have raised on the former master’s
lands, and in some cases, so obstinate are they in these demands, that I
have had to arrest them before they would come to terms.” 24

With emancipation, many former slaves obviously sensed a new power
and evinced a determination to test it. The mere offer of compensation
would not assure the employers of a stable and contented labor force. To
pay them for their labor, after all, did not resolve all fundamental ques¬
tions about authority, autonomy, and control of the land. Whether pro¬
voked by a wage dispute or some other grievance, freedmen continued to
leave the old places, sometimes en masse. Still more remained and worked
indifferently, reserving any enthusiasm they might have for their own
individual garden plots. Looking at those small gardens, which they had

Back to Work: The New Dependency

399

tended and cherished as slaves, many freedmen had heard enough to imag¬
ine them expanded into forty-acre farms. That remained the most exciting
prospect of all, exceeding in importance and in emotional investment any
question of wages.

Shortly after the fall of Richmond, the scene acted out on the nearby
Rosewood plantation posed the problem a number of landowners would
have to face soon enough. After having promised to remain and work, a
freedman named Cyrus absented himself from the fields. When Emma
Mordecai, the plantation mistress, questioned him about his conduct, he
replied by advancing his own perception of how matters stood between
them.

Seems lak we’uns do all the wuck and gits a part. Der ain’t goin’ ter be
no more Master and Mistress, Miss Emma. All is equal. I done hear it
from de cotehouse steps.... All de land belongs to de Yankees now, and
dey gwine to divide it out ’mong de colored people. Besides, de kitchen ob
de big house is my share. I help built hit. 25

Even as they toiled in the same fields, performed the familiar tasks, and
returned at dusk to the same cabins, scores of freedmen refused to resign
themselves to the permanent status of a landless agricultural working-
class. Like most Americans, they aspired to something better and yearned
for economic independence and self-employment. Without that independ-
ence, their freedom seemed incomplete, even precarious. "Every colored
man will be a slave, & feel himself a slave,” a black soldier insisted, "until
he can raise him own bale of cotton & put him own mark upon it & say dis
is mine!” Although often expressed vaguely, as if to talk about it openly
might be unwise, the expectation many ex-slaves shared in the aftermath
of the war was that "something extraordinary’ ’ would soon intervene to
reshape the course of their lives. In the Jubilee they envisioned, the govern-
ment provided them with forty-acre lots and thereby emancipated them
from dependency on their former masters. "This was no slight error, no
trifling idea,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer reported from Mississippi in
1865, "but a fixed and earnest conviction as strong as any belief a man can
ever have.” 26 The feeling was sufficiently pervasive, in fact, to prompt
thousands of freedmen in late 1865 to hold back on any commitment of
their labor until the question of land had been firmly resolved.

The only real question among some blacks was not whether the lands
belonging to the former slaveholders would be divided and distributed, but
when and how. Freedmen in South Carolina heard that the large planta¬
tions along the coast were to be distributed. Equally persistent reports
suggested that the lands on which the ex-slaves were working would be

400

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

divided among them. Few blacks in Mississippi, a Bureau officer reported
in November 1865, expressed any interest in hiring themselves out for the
next year. "Nearly all of them have heard, that at Christmas, Government
is going to take the planters’ lands and other property from them, and give
it to the colored people, and that, in this way they are going to begin to farm
on their own account.” In a Virginia community, the freedmen had report¬
edly deposited their savings with "responsible” persons so as to be in the
most advantageous position to purchase lots of "de confiscated land, as soon
as de Gov’ment ready to sell it.” And in Georgia a black laborer was so
certain that he "coolly” offered to sell to his former master the share of the
plantation he expected to receive "after the division.” 27

Although confident of retaining their lands, planters expressed grow¬
ing concern over the extent to which the freedmen’s aspirations interfered
with the normalization of agricultural operations. It proved difficult to
raise crops when laborers went about "stuffed with the idea of proprietor¬
ship” and the anticipation of soon becoming their own employers. "You
cannot beat into their thick skulls that the land & every thing else does not
belong to them,” a South Carolina planter wrote his daughter. Since many
whites refused to believe their blacks capable of formulating perceptions
of freedom, they blamed the land mania on "fanatical abolitionists,” incen¬
diary preachers, and the Yankee invaders. But those who had overheard
the "curious” wartime discussions in which the blacks apportioned the
lands among themselves knew better, as did the victims of black expropria¬
tion. Where planters had fled, abandoning their properties, the freed slaves
had in numerous instances seized control and they gave little indication
after the war of yielding their authority to the returning owners. Along the
Savannah River, blacks under the leadership of Abalod Shigg seized two
major plantations on the assumption that they were entitled to "forty acres
and a mule.” Federal troops had to be called in to dislodge them. Elsewhere,
similar seizures revealed the intensity of black feelings about the land and
created a volatile situation that many native whites and Federal officials
feared might erupt into armed confrontations. 28

As if to confirm black land aspirations, the Federal government
adopted an ambitious settlement program in direct response to the thou¬
sands of unwanted and burdensome freed slaves who had attached them¬
selves to the Union Army in the wake of General Sherman’s march to the
sea. On January 12, 1865, Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton con¬
ferred with twenty black ministers and church officers in Savannah to
ascertain what could be done about these people. The delegation suggested
that land was the key to black freedom. "We want to be placed on land until
we are able to buy it, and make it our own,” the spokesmen for the group
declared. Several days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15,
a far-reaching document that set aside for the exclusive use of the freed¬
men a strip of coastal land abandoned by Confederate owners between
Charleston, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, granting black set¬
tlers "possessory titles” to forty-acre lots. Although intended only to deal

Back to Work: The New Dependency

401

with a specific military and refugee problem, the order encouraged the
growing impression among the freedmen that their Yankee liberators in¬
tended to provide them with an essential undergirding for their emancipa¬
tion. That impression gained still further credence when Congress made
the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau the custodian of all abandoned
and confiscated land (largely the lands seized for nonpayment of the direct
Federal tax or belonging to disloyal planters who had fled); ex-slaves and
loyal Unionists could pre-empt forty-acre lots, rent them at nominal rates
for three years, and purchase them within that period at a fair price (about
sixteen times the annual rent). If the Bureau had implemented this provi¬
sion, and if blacks had been able to accumulate the necessary funds, some
20,000 black families would have been provided with the means for becom¬
ing self-sustaining farmers. 29

To apportion the large landed estates among those who worked them
and who had already expended years of uncompensated toil mad^ such
eminent sense to the ex-slave that he could not easily dismiss this aspira¬
tion as but another "exaggerated” or "absurd” view of freedom. "My mas¬
ter has had me ever since I was seven years old, and never give me
nothing,” observed a twenty-one-year-old laborer in Richmond. "I worked
for him twelve years, and I think something is due me.” Expecting nothing
from his old master, he now trusted the government to do "something for
us.” The day a South Carolina rice planter anticipated trouble was when
one of his field hands told him that "the land ought to belong to the man
who (alone) could work it, ” not to those who "sit in the house” and profit
by the labor of others. Such sentiments easily translated into the most
American of aspirations. "All I wants is to git to own fo’ or five acres ob
land, dat I can build me a little house on and call my home,” a Mississippi
black explained. With the acquisition of land, the ex-slave viewed himself
entering the mainstream of American life, cultivating his own farm and
raising the crops with which to sustain himself and his family. That was
the way to respectability in an agricultural society, and the freedman
insisted that a plot of land was all he required to lift himself up: "Gib us
our own land and we take care ourselves; but widout land, de ole m ^ssas
can hire us or starve us, as dey please.” And what better way to confirm
their emancipation than to own the very land on which they had been
working and which they had made productive and valuable by their own
labor. 30

The expectation of "forty acres and a mule” may have been sheer
delusion, but the freedmen had sufficient reason to think otherwise. Since
the outbreak of the war, many of them had overheard their masters talk
in fearful tones about how the Yankees, if successful, would divide up the
land among the blacks. The Freedmen’s Bureau, in fact, blamed the false
expectations of land on Confederate slaveholders who had exploited the
fear of confiscation during the war to arouse propertied whites to greater
exertions and sacrifices. The deception was deliberately cultivated in some
instances by planters who were determined to keep their ex-slaves until the

402

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

postwar crops had been harvested; at least, numerous disappointed freed-
men recalled how they had been assured the Federal government would
grant them plots of land after the completion of the agricultural season.
When the Yankees finally arrived, they reinforced the land fever by assur¬
ing the freed slaves of their right to forty acres and a mule. When a Union
soldier asked him if he had ever been whipped, West Turner of Virginia
recalled, he had replied, "Yessir, boss, gimme thirty and nine any ole time.”
Upon hearing this, the soldier advised him to take one acre of land for each
time he had been whipped and an extra acre as a bonus. "So I measure off
best I could forty acres of dat corn field an 5 staked it out. De Yanks give
all Fayette Jackson’s land away to de Negroes an plenty mo’ other Secesh
land. But when Marse Jackson come back, we had to give it all up.” 31

Although they might have had good reason to doubt the word of their
masters and even the white Yankee troops, some freedmen claimed to have
heard the same promises repeated by their own leaders. The fleeing slaves
who boarded the Union gunboats on the Combahee River heard the reas¬
suring refrain with which the much-idolized Harriet Tubman welcomed
them:

Of all the whole creation in the East or in the West,

The glorious Yankee nation is the greatest and the best
Come along! Come along! don’t be alarmed,

Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm.

Still further encouragement came from black soldiers and black missionar¬
ies, who sought to prepare their people for the responsibilities they would
soon assume and placed particular emphasis on the imminent division of
the lands. "It’s de white man’s turn ter labor now,” a black preacher in
Florida told an assemblage of field hands. "He ain’t got nuthin’ lef ’ but his
lan’, an’ de lan’ won’t be his’n long, fur de Guverment is gwine ter gie ter
ev’ry Nigger forty acres of lan’ an’ a mule.” 32

Within the first two years after the war, freedmen who embraced and
acted upon the expectation of "forty acres and a mule” learned soon
enough to face up to the possibility of disappointment. When some former
Alabama slaves staked off the land they had been working and claimed it
as their own, the owner quickly set matters straight: "Listen, niggers,
what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. You are just as free as I
and the missus, but don’t go foolin’ around my land.” Of course, planters
derived considerable comfort from the knowledge that Federal officials
were prepared to confirm their property rights. Until the blacks acknowl¬
edged the futility of land expectations, the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized
how difficult it would be to stabilize agricultural operations. With that
sense of priorities, the Bureau instructed its agents to do everything in
their power to disabuse the ex-slaves of any lingering illusions about taking
over their masters’ lands. "This was the first difficulty that the Officers of
the Bureau had to contend with,” a Mississippi officer wrote, "and nothing

Back to Work: The New Dependency

403

but their efforts and explanations, kept off the storm. Even now, it is but
a temporary settlement.” If the blacks refused to believe their old masters,
Bureau agents were quite prepared to visit the plantations in person and
impart the necessary confirmation: "The government owns no lands in this
State. It therefore can give away none. Freedmen can obtain farms with
the money which they have earned by their labor. Every one, therefore,
shall work diligently, and carefully save his wages, till he may be able to
buy land and possess his own home.” The blacks he encountered held so
tenaciously to their illusions, a Bureau officer in Alabama observed, that
"unless they see me and hear me refute the story, they persist in the
belief.” Still other officers reported that the freedmen refused to believe
them, too, or thought the question of land might be negotiable. After being
told of the government’s policy, a Virginia freedman offered to lower his
expectations to a single acre of land—"ef you make it de acre dat Marsa’s
house sets on.” 33

As an alternative to confiscation, Freedmen’s Bureau officers and
northern white missionaries and teachers advanced the classic mid¬
nineteenth-century self-help ideology and implored the newly freed slaves
to heed its lessons. Rather than entertain notions of government bounties,
they should cultivate habits of frugality, temperance, honesty, and hard
work; if they did so, they might not only accumulate the savings to pur¬
chase land but would derive greater personal satisfaction from having
earned it in this manner. Almost identical advice permeated the editorials
of black newspapers, the speeches of black leaders, and the resolutions
adopted by black meetings. "Let us go to work faithfully for whoever pays
fairly, until we ourselves shall become employers and planters,” the Black
Republican, a New Orleans newspaper, editorialized in its first issue. With
an even finer grasp of American values, a black Charlestonian thought
economic success capable of overriding the remai n i n g vestiges of racial
slavery. "This is the panacea which will heal all the maladies of a Negro¬
phobia type. Let colored men simply do as anybody else in business does,
be self-reliant, industrious, producers of the staples for market and mer¬
chandise, and he will have no more trouble on account of his complexion,
than the white men have about the color of their hair or beards.” 34

To provide proper models for their people, black newspapers featured
examples of self-made freedmen who had managed to accumulate land and
were forming the nucleus of a propertied and entrepreneurial class in the
South. Actually, a number of blacks had done precisely that, some of them
fortunate enough to have purchased tax lands and still others who had
taken advantage of the Homestead Act or who had made enough money to
purchase a plot in their old neighborhoods. 35 But the number of propertied
blacks remained small, and some of these found they had been defrauded
by whites who had an equal appreciation of the self-help philosophy and
made the most of it. 36 Even the blacks who obtained legitimate title to
lands soon discovered the elusive quality of economic success. The land
often turned out to be of an inferior quality, the freedman usually lacked

404

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the capital and credit to develop it properly, and he might consequently
find himself enmeshed in the very web of indebtedness and dependency he
had sought to escape. By the acquisition of land, he hardly avoided the
same problems plaguing so many white farmers. 37

No matter what the freedmen were told or what precepts they were
admonished to follow, the belief in some form ofland redistribution demon¬
strated a remarkable vitality. The wartime precedents and promises were
apt to speak louder in some regions than the insistent postwar denials.
Thousands of ex-slaves had been placed on forty-acre tracts under Sher¬
man’s program, the earlier experiments at Davis Bend and on the Sea
Islands persisted into 1865, and the stories of individual and collective
success by the black settlers who worked these lands would seem to have
assured the continuation and expansion of such projects. But even if few
blacks elsewhere in the South knew of them, even if still fewer were aware
of the congressional debate on Thaddeus Stevens’ ambitious land confisca¬
tion program or of the immense generosity of the Federal government in
awarding millions of acres to railroad corporations, the idea of "forty acres
and a mule” simply made too much sense and had become too firmly
entrenched in the minds of too many freedmen for it to be given up at the
first words of a Bureau underling. Nor could the thousands of ex-slaves on
abandoned and confiscated lands in 1865 understand that the Federal
policies which made their settlement possible had not been long-term com¬
mitments but rather temporary military expedients, designed to keep them
working on the plantations and away from the cities and the Union Army
camps.

Resilient though they were, the hopes of the freedmen could withstand
only so many shocks. When the governor of Florida told them, "The Presi¬
dent will not give you one foot of land, nor a mule, nor a hog, nor a cow,
nor even a knife or fork or spoon,” he could be dismissed as a mouthpiece
of planters who stood to lose the most from a confiscation scheme. When
a Bureau officer told some Georgia blacks essentially the same thing, one
disbelieving freedman remarked, "Dat’s no Yank; dat just some reb dey
dressed in blue clothes and brought him here to lie to us.” But the denials
began to assume a substance that could no longer be ignored. On May 29,
1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his Proclamation of Amnesty,
whereby most former Confederates were to be pardoned and recover any
of their lands which might have been confiscated or occupied. That had to
be taken seriously—as seriously as the Federal officers who now prepared
to implement the order. In some communities, the news coincided with a
rumor, said to have been circulated by planters, that the President had
revoked the Emancipation Proclamation. To many freedmen, contemplat¬
ing what would happen to the lands they had worked and expected to own,
that was no rumor at all. "Amnesty for the persons, no amnesty for the
property,” the New Orleans Tribune cried. "It is enough for the republic
to spare the life of the rebels—without restoring to them their plantations
and palaces.” Under Johnson’s magnanimous pardoning policy, any faint

Back to Work: The New Dependency

405

hope of a land division collapsed, along with the promising wartime prece¬
dents. Rather than confirm the settlers in possession of the land they had
cultivated and on which they had erected their homes, the government now
proposed to return the plantations to those for whom they had previously
labored as slaves. Not satisfied with having their lands returned, some of
the owners displayed their own brands of "insolence” and "ingratitude” by
claiming damages for any alterations made by the black settlers and
by suing them for "back rents” for the use of the land. 38

The freedmen found themselves incredulous at this apparent betrayal
of expectations and trust. At first, some of them could not believe or fully
grasp the implications of the restoration. When a Bureau officer addressed
the freedmen in one South Carolina community, the blacks came in their
best clothes and in high spirits, obviously expecting a very different kind
of announcement. "If the general don’t tell them cuffees they’re to have
their share o’ our land and bosses and everything else,” a local planter
warned, "you’ll see a hell of a row today.” No "row” took place but the faces
of the assembled freedmen, after being told there would be no land division,
said it all. The more Federal officers tried to explain and defend the deci¬
sion, the less sense it made to the black audiences and the less able they
were to contain their rage. "Damn such freedom as that,” a Georgia black
declared after a Bureau agent had addressed them. 39

Where substantial numbers of freedmen had settled on abandoned
lands, as in the Sea Islands, the disappointment was bound to be felt most
keenly. Appreciating that fact, General O. O. Howard, who headed the
Freedmen’s Bureau and may have been second only to Lincoln in the
esteem of the ex-slaves, decided to pay a personal visit to Edisto Island to
inform the settlers that they must give up the lands they had been cultivat¬
ing as their own. Perhaps only Howard could possibly make them believe
it. As if to prepare the assemblage for the ordeal ahead, he thought it might
be appropriate for them to begin the meeting with a song. Suddenly an old
woman on the edge of the crowd began to sing, "Nobody knows the trouble
I’ve seen,” and the entire throng of more than two thousand soon joined
in a resounding chorus. Whether it was the song, the look of dismay on
their faces, or the shouts of "No! No!” that greeted his announcement,
Howard found himself so flustered that he could barely finish his speech.
But he had nevertheless articulated the government’s position. They
should lay aside any bitter feelings they harbored for their former masters
and contract to work for them. By working for wages or shares, he assured
them, they would be achieving the same ends as possession of the soil would
have given them. If the freedmen found Howard’s advice incomprehensi¬
ble, that was only because they understood him all too clearly. 40

The hope Bureau officials held out for the freedmen was largely a cruel
delusion. The same men who had been disabusing the minds of the ex¬
slaves of their land expectations now urged them to bind themselves to the
white man’s land. That was another way of saying they should give up the
struggle altogether. Not all of them were willing to do so, at least not at

406

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the outset. What the freedmen on Edisto Island found most offensive in
Howard’s speech, apart from having to give up their claims to the land, was
the suggestion that they should now work for their former masters. In the
petition they addressed to the President, the Edisto blacks argued that no
man who had only recently faced his master on the field of battle should
now be expected to submit to him for the necessities of life. He was more
than willing to forgive his old master, another freedman remarked, but to
have to submit to his rule again demanded too much. "He had lived all his
life with a basket over his head, and now that it had been taken off and air
and s unligh t, had come to him, he could not consent to have the basket over
him again.” Rather than face that eventuality, the blacks on several is¬
lands near Edisto rowed themselves to Savannah, leaving behind their
household goods and the crops they had made. 41 But some of the freedmen
had worked too long and too hard on these lands to give them up so easily,
and they resolved to remain and fight.

To inform the blacks that their land aspirations were all a delusion
was difficult enough. But to remove them from the lands they had come to
regard as their own often required more than verbal skills. In Norfolk
County, Virginia, the freedmen who had settled on Taylor’s farm refused
to leave, ignoring the court orders and ousting the sheriffs and Federal
officers who tried to enforce them. After assembling together, the blacks
refused offers of compromise, questioned the President’s right to pardon
the original owner, and resolved to defend their property. At this meeting,
Richard Parker ("better known as 'Uncle Dick,’ ” said the Norfolk newspa¬
per) explained to his fellow freedmen that the white man had secured this
land only by forcibly expelling the Indians and he suggested that they now
exercise the same prerogative.

We don’t care for the President nor the Freedmen’s Bureau. We have
suffered long enough; let the white man suffer now. The time was when
the white man could say, "Come here, John, and black my boots,” and
the poor black man had to go; but, my friends, the times have changed,
and I hope I will live to see the day when I can say to the white man,
"Come here, John, and black my boots,” and he must come. I will never
be satisfied until the white man is forced to serve the black man, as the
black was formerly compelled to serve the white. Now, my friends, we
must drive them away.

After a pitched battle with county agents, the black settlers were finally
driven off the land. 42

Along the South Carolina coast, blacks barricaded themselves on the
plantations, destroyed the bridges leading to them, and shot at owners
seeking to repossess them. On several of the Sea Islands, they organized
along military lines to hold their lands and treated any claimants as tres¬
passers. "They use threatening language, when the former residents of the
Islands are spoken of in any manner,” a Bureau officer reported, "and say

Back to Work: The New Dependency

407

openly, that none of them, will be permitted to live upon the Islands. They
are not willing to be reasoned with on this subject/’ On Johns Island, the
blacks in early 1866 persisted in refusing to contract, insisted they would
work only for themselves, and refused to surrender ownership of the land
—in theory or in fact. When "a party of Northern Gentlemen” proposed
to look over real estate prospects on the island, they were made "prisoners”
the moment they landed, disarmed, and advised never to return. With
similar vigilance, the blacks on James Island repelled the first landing
party of planters who had come to recover their lands. The battle over
restoration of the lands soon resembled a series of mopping-up operations,
with the Freedmen’s Bureau and Federal troops always ready to guarantee
the safety and property of the returning owners, and the blacks able to hold
out only for so long against the dictates of the law and the force of an
army. 43

If blacks could not acquire land by government action, neither would
they find it easy to obtain it by any other means, even if they adopted the
self-help precepts and accumulated the necessary funds. Appreciating the
threat black proprietorship posed to a dependent, stable, and contented
work force, and the feelings of "impudence and independence” it might
generate, many planters refused to sell or to rent any land to blacks. Such
a policy was in accordance with "the general good,” a South Carolina rice
planter insisted, for once lands were leased to freedmen, "it will be hard
ever to recover the privileges that have been yielded.” When whites tried
to restrict landownership in the Black Codes or in combinations among
themselves, the Federal government revoked their actions. But community
pressures often achieved the same results. "I understand Dr. Harris and
Mr. Varnedoe will rent their lands to the Negroes!” a much-scandalized
Mary Jones wrote her daughter. "The conduct of some of the citizens has
been very injurious to the best interest of the community.” If whites per¬
sisted in such behavior, they faced social ostracism or violence to their
property. Any white man found selling land in his parish, a Louisiana
plantation manager observed, would "soon be dangling from some trees.”
Of course, restrictions on the sale and rental of land to blacks could not
always be applied with the rigidity some whites desired, particularly when
landowners found that leasing might be the only way to keep their land in
productive use. 44

Within a year of the war’s end, the planter class had virtually com¬
pleted the recovery of its property. But repossession would be of limited
value without a productive and regulated black laboring force to work the
lands. Few stated the problem more candidly than Allen S. Izard, a Georgia
planter. Now that the "game of confiscation” had been settled, his fellow
planters needed most urgently to consolidate their triumph.

Our place is to work; take hold & persevere; get labour of some kind; get

possession of the places; stick to it; oust the negroes; and their ideas of

proprietorship; secure armed protection close at hand on our exposed

408

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

River, present a united and determined front; and make as much rice as
we can.... Our plantations will have to be assimilated to the industrial
establishment of other parts of the world, where the owner is protected
by labour tallies, time tables, checks of all kinds, & constant watchful¬
ness. Every operator will steal time and anything else. 45

The terms he chose to describe the challenge facing planters in the postwar
South suggested the need to adopt modern industrial techniques to ensure
their continued mastery over a class of workers who had only recently
broken the chains of bondage. That the ideal binding force should have
been introduced by Northerners would seem, therefore, to have been less
ironic than logical. Like the planters, Federal authorities appreciated full
well the need to guarantee and compel black labor. When the officers of the
Freedmen’s Bureau enlightened the ex-slaves in the fall of 1865 on the
futility of their land expectations, they supplied at the same time the forms
that the new dependency would assume.

When the postwar southern legislatures adopted measures to compel
blacks to contract with an employer or face arrest as vagrants, they had
merely written into law what the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau
had already demanded of the freed slaves. Despite the virtual abrogation
of the Black Codes, the contract system remained very much intact. In
South Carolina, for example, the Union commander voided the Codes but
simultaneously ordered freedmen to contract in the next ten days or leave
the plantations on which they lived. The Codes had contained clauses
which offended northern standards of justice and fairness. The contract, on
the other hand, was a much-venerated instrument of law which enjoyed
high standing both in the North and in the South. Embodying as it did a
voluntary agreement between two parties, in which the terms and condi¬
tions were spelled out, the contract suggested what the Codes had not—
impartiality, equality before the law, and the traditional American virtues
of give-and-take and compromise.

Federal authorities introduced the contract into wartime labor rela¬
tions in the South as a way of protecting the newly freed slaves, easing the
transition from slave to free labor, and compelling former owners to recog¬
nize emancipation and compensate their workers. Drawn up initially by
Union Army officers and Freedmen’s Bureau agents, the contract also
came to be accepted as the most expedient way to get the blacks back to
the fields, to regulate the quality of their labor, and to ensure a stable
working force for the highly seasonal agriculture of the South. With often
the noblest of intentions, then, the Freedmen’s Bureau, from the moment
of its inception, urged the ex-slaves to sign contracts, assured them they

Back to Work: The New Dependency

409

would be treated fairly, and warned them of the consequences of noncom¬
pliance. "Your contracts were explained to you, and their sacredness im¬
pressed upon you, again and again,” the Bureau commissioner for
Mississippi told the freedmen. "If you do not have some occupation you will
be treated as vagrants, and made to labor on public works. 546

The planters were in such perfect agreement about what they expected
of their freed black laborers that they often used the same language in the
contracts. By affixing his signature to the agreement, the freedman invari¬
ably promised to render "perfect obedience,” to be "prompt and faithful”
in the performance of his duties, and to maintain a proper demeanor. On
the Heyward plantations in South Carolina, the laborers not only recog¬
nized the "lawful authority” of the employer and his agents but agreed to
conduct themselves "in such manner as to gain the good will of those to
whom we must always look for protection.” 47 Few employers went so far
as the South Carolina planter who bound his blacks to be "strictly as my
slaves” in obeying his instructions. Nor did many think it necessary to
adopt the proviso which another planter insisted upon that the freedmen
always address him as "master.” But few would have dissented from the
spirit that had inspired such stipulations. It made little difference to H. A.
Moore, a South Carolina planter, if his freedmen addressed him and his
wife as "Mr. & Mrs. Moore” or simply as "Massa Maurice & Miss Bettie,
but they were always to "speak politely to us.” 48 t

Lest the freedman be in any way tempted to compromise his 'perfect
obedience,” most contracts barred him from possessing "deadly weapons”
or "ardent spirits,” and the employer reserved the right to enter the freed-
man’s cabin at any time. During working hours, moreover, the laborer
agreed to have no visitors and to obtain his employer’s permission before
leaving the plantation for any reason (numerous contracts required such
permission at all times). In some regions, the freedmen agreed to submit
to punishment for contract violations—"our employer being the judge
whether we are to be punished or turned off.” But most contracts could not
provide corporal punishment for violations, if only because a Bureau offi¬
cial might disallow the entire agreement; however, employers did specify
fines for any absenteeism, negligence in work, or breakdowns in expected
demeanor. For the more serious offenses, like insubordination or desertion,
the laborer could be dismissed, thereby forfeiting all or a portion of his
wages and crop shares for the year. 49 In some rare instances, as on one
South Carolina plantation, the employer agreed to submit cases of miscon¬
duct and conflicts between himself and the freedmen to a jury of his own
laborers, whose judgments would be binding on both parties. The mode
contract drawn up by Martin Delany in South Carolina stipulated that the
panel adjudging such disputes include the employer, a freedma n , and a
third party acceptable to both of them. But if the offense warranted dis¬
missal or a forfeiture of pay, an officer of the Freedmen’s Bureau would
preside and make the final decision. 50

Under the old task system, which some contracts maintained, a la-

410

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

borer had been expected to complete a prescribed amount of work each day,
with the rest of the time his own. To determine how much work a free
laborer, as distinct from a slave, should perform each day raised some
obvious difficulties, but some enterprising planters and overseers resolved
the dilemma by borrowing from past experience. "There’s a heap in hum-
buggin’ a nigger,” a Mississippi overseer advised. "I worked a gang this
s umm er, and got as much work out of ’em as I ever did. I just had my
leading nigger, and I says to him, I says, 'Sam, I want this yer crop out by
such a time; now you go a-head, talk to the niggers, and lead ’em off right
smart, and I’ll give you twenty-five dollars.’ Then I got up a race, and give
a few dollars to the men that picked the most cotton, till I found out the
extent of what each man could pick; then I required that of him every day,
or I docked his wages.” Precisely because the task and gang systems re¬
mained vivid reminders of slavery, both came into growing disrepute after
the war; most contracts stipulated a six-day workweek and a ten- to twelve-
hour workday—usually from sunrise to sunset, with an hour or more for
dinner. The question of time off on Saturday would take on increasing
importance in the annual negotiations over a new contract. 51

Reacting against the close personal supervision that had characterized
slavery, the freedmen had already expressed strong reservations about the
presence of an overseer on the plantation. During the war, newly freed
slaves had vented much of their anger on their overseer, and in some
instances they had either driven him off or refused to work until he had
been removed. After the war, antipathy to the overseer in no way dimin¬
ished, despite the efforts of some planters to make the position more palat¬
able and more consistent with emancipation by redesignating the overseer
as a superintendent. "With the negroes a name is imposing,” one observer
wrote. "Many would engage cheerfully to work under a 'superintendent,’
who would not have entered the field under an 'overseer.’ ” But the distinc¬
tion escaped many ex-slaves, and this same observer conceded that "it is
easier to change an odious name than an odious character.” As a Missis¬
sippi planter confided to him, "I should get along very well with my niggers,
if I could only get my superintendent to treat them decently. Instead of
cheering and encouraging them, he bullies and scolds them, and sometimes
so forgets hims elf as to kick and beat them. Now they are free they won’t
stand it. They stood it when they were slaves, because they had to.” On a
plantation in Coahoma County, Mississippi, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent
endeavored to ascertain why the laborers objected to the employment of a
former overseer to supervise the work. "I made inquiries regarding the
treatment of the hands, by Mr. Hogan, and found no complaint whatever;
the only objection was that he was an old overseer. The Freedmen have an
idea that overseers are no longer allowed.” He lectured the freedmen on
their obligation to obey "whoever their employer chose to employ as their
superintendent.” 52

Where an overseer no longer supervised the field hands, black dissatis¬
faction would now most likely fall directly on the employer himself or on

Back to Work: The New Dependency

411

the black driver. Like the overseer and the task and gang systems, the
driver symbolized for many blacks the excesses and dose supervision of
slavery; nevertheless, he enjoyed considerably more staying power than
the overseer, and the freedmen tended to view his presence with fewer
misgivings. The typical contract obligated laborers to obey a driver selected
from their ranks, but "out of compliment to the changed times” he would
now be known as a foreman or captain. That satisfied some freedmen, but
only if a change in personnel accompanied the new appellation. In the Sea
Islands, a group of laborers told a Union officer that "the drivers ought now
to work as field hands, and some field hands be drivers in their place.”
Already convinced that the old ways of manag in g blacks would no longer
suffice, Edward B. Heyward, the South Carolina rice planter, acknowledged
the importance of naming as his foreman an individual who had never
before held that position. "Had he turned loose old 'Wasp’ [the former
driver] on the plantation,” Heyward’s son recalled, "I am quite sure he
would have had few Negroes in his fields. But how Wasp would have
enjoyed it!” On many plantations, however, the old driver still commanded
the respect and loyalty of the blacks, and employers relied heavily on his
leadership to continue agricultural operations with the least amount of
disruption; in some places, as on the Manigault rice plantations, the land-
owner m flHs a contract with a black foreman or manager, in which he
entrusted the entire agricultural operation to him, including the hiring
and disciplining of the hands. At the end of the year, the owner retained
one half of the net profits, while the blacks divided the rest among them¬
selves. "Little or no intercourse is thus held between Gen’l Harrison [the
employer] and the Mass of the Negroes,” Manigault wrote of that unique
arrangement on his old place, "and provided the Work is performed it is
immaterial what Hands are employed.” 53

If the constraints imposed by contracts upon the movements and be¬
havior of black laborers assumed a near uniformity, the amount and the
method of compensation tended to vary considerably, even within the same
region. "I furnish everything but clothes, and give my freedmen one third
of the crop they make,” an Arkansas planter declared, but "on twenty
plantations around me, there are ten different styles of contracts. The
compensation offered a freedman reflected the scarcity of labor in the
district, the planter’s ability to pay, agricultural prospects, how success¬
fully the laborers pressed their demands, and how effectively planters were
able to decide among themselves on maximum rates. Despite variations
within regions, the wage rates and crop shares tended to be higher in the
lower than in the upper South: a first-class male field hand could generally
expect to make no more than $5-$10 a month in Virginia, North Carolina,
and Tennessee; $8-$12 in South Carolina and Georgia; $10-$18 in Missis¬
sippi, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana; and $15-$25 in Arkansas and
Texas. On the same plantation, however, wage scales fluctuated according
to how the employer classified his laborers; on a Mississippi plantation, for
example, the employer paid first-class male laborers $15 a month, first-

412

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

class women $10, and drivers $40, while the average hand netted about

$10. 54

The value of these wages obviously depended upon the degree to which
the employer maintained his laborers—that is, whether he furnished the
lodgings, food, clothing, and medical care or deducted those items from
wages. On a plantation in Louisiana, for example, field hands earned $25
a month but they had to purchase their food, clothing, and other provisions,
and each hand paid a tax to ensure regular visits by a doctor; most of the
wage, they testified, went for food, they could ill afford a contemplated tax
for schools, and it was "pretty tight living.” The method and time of pay¬
ment reflected an employer’s dim view of black character. The alleged
propensity of blacks to spend their wages quickly and foolishly induced
employers to insert clauses in contracts whereby they would provide cer¬
tain necessities "at the current prices” and deduct the expense from the
freedmen’s pay. And to ensure compliance with the contract, they pre¬
ferred to pay the laborer half of his earnings on a quarterly or monthly
basis, withholding the rest until the end of the year; in many cases, they
withheld all payments until the crop had been completed, although ad¬
vancing money or provisions against the final settlement. If a laborer
worked for a portion of the crop rather than wages, his share usually
ranged from one fifth (with board) to one half (less the deductions made for
provisions). Since the agreed-upon share would be divided among all the
laborers on the plantation, individuals received amounts commensurate
with the work they performed and their position and sex. 55

With the advent of paid labor, planters and freedmen failed to agree
even among themselves on the respective merits of compensation in cash
wages or in shares of the crop. To the planters, many of them desperately
short of cash after the war, payment in shares reflected at first nothing
more than economic necessity. But some came to prefer this method of
payment, thinking it might ensure a more stable work force and stimulate
the freedmen by giving them "an interest and pride in the crop.” The
planters who remained skeptical feared that payment in shares would
encourage the hands to think they had an interest in the land as well as
the crop, make them even more presumptuous and independent, and in¬
crease the difficulty of discharging inefficient workers. Both methods of
payment remained popular, with some planters trying both at various
times and assessing the results. That neither system exacted the desired
amount of labor they attributed largely to the freedman’s slovenly work
habits and racial traits rather than to his inevitable disappointment on
payday. Based upon the freedman’s experience with wages or shares, the
issue took on growing importance in the negotiations that preceded a new
contract. 58

Although r unning the risk of having a Federal official disallow the
contract, some planters tried to capitalize on the freedman’s illiteracy and
the Freedmen’s Bureau’s indifference. On one plantation, the contract
awarded to the laborers one third of seven twelfths of the crop; in another

Back to Work: The New Dependency

413

instance, four freedmen contracted to work for one fifth of one third of the
crop and foiM to realize their error until the final settlement. "Contracts
which were brought to me for approval contained all sorts of ludicrous
provisions,” a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina recalled. "The
idea seemed to be that if the laborer were not bound body and soul he would
be of no use.” The rumors that circulated among freedmen that a contract
would bind them for life or a seven-year apprenticeship were based in part
on the efforts of certain employers to do precisely that. "Master, an Ala¬
bama freedman declared as he packed his belongings to leave the planta¬
tion, "they say if we make contracts now, we’ll be branded, and made slaves
again.” Some Bureau officials spent nearly as much time reassuring freed¬
men on this point as they did explaining the terms of contracts.

Some of you have the absurd notion that if you put your hands to a
contract you will somehow be made slaves. This is all nonsense, made up
by some foolish or wicked person. There is no danger of this kind to fear,
nor will you be branded when you get on a plantation. Any white man
treating you so would be punished. 57

In numerous instances, however, freedmen affixed their names to contracts
which only perpetuated the terms by which they had served as slaves.
"Heap of ’em, round here, just works for their victuals and clothes, like
they always did,” a South Carolina planter observed. "I reckon they’ll all

be back whar they was, in a few years.” 58

Although designed to protect the interests of planters and freedmen
alike, the contract in practice gave employers what they had wanted all
along—the crucial element of control by which they could bind the ex¬
slaves for at least a year and compel them to work and maintain proper
behavior. Nor did the presence of a Freedmen’s Bureau officer necessarily
make the contracts any less oppressive; after all, one agent conceded, the
objective of the contract was to prevent black laborers from deserting their
employers "at a critical time” in the making of the crop. Whatever the
initial intent, the contract system embodied that universally accepted dic¬
tum *hnt only compulsion and discipline could induce free blacks to work.
Unlike the northern worker who entered into a verbal contract with an
employer, the black laborer in the postwar South was bound by a legal
instrument which not only stipulated objective terms of service (compensa¬
tion, hours, and duties) but imposed conditions of demeanor and attitude
on the laborer and not on the employer. That feature in itself made the
question of compliance or noncompliance necessarily arbitrary and re¬
vealed the contract as something less than a bilateral agreement between
equals. In so many ways, in fact, the new arrangements simply institution¬
alized the old discipline under the guise of easing the ex-slave’s transition
to freedom. After comparing the regulations under slavery with those
which now controlled free labor, the New Orleans Tribune found but few
differences: "All the important prohibitions imposed upon the slave, are

414

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

also enforced against the freedman.... It is true that the law calls him a
freeman; but any white man, subjected to such restrictive and humiliating
prohibitions, will certainly call hims elf a slave.” 59

By hedging the freedman’s newly acquired rights, by narrowing his
room for maneuverability, by robbing him of his principal bargaining
strengths, by seeking to control both his social behavior and his labor, the
contract between a former master and his former slaves reminded one
observer of a "patent rat-trap.” No one, he noted, could have devised a
surer instrument to compel black labor. "Rats couldn’t possibly get out of
it. The only difficulty was that they declined to go in.” 60

Once the contract had been prepared, the employer assembled the la¬
borers on his place (most of them his former slaves), explained the terms,
and urged them to sign. The response was likely to be mixed, with some
freedmen walking back to their quarters only to pack their belongings and
take to the road, unwilling to commit their labor and lives to an agreement
they could not even read. The very formality, obscure legalisms, and bind¬
ing nature of the contract provoked skepticism and dismay, even in ex¬
slaves who fully intended to remain with their former master. In Burke
County, Georgia, Willis Bennefield would have nothing to do with a con¬
tract. "What you want me to sign for? I is free,” he told the man who had
owned him as a slave. Nor did the master’s explanation that the contract
held both of them to their word satisfy him. "If I is already free, I don’t need
to sign no paper,” he insisted. "If I was workin’ for you and doin’ for you
befo’ I got free, I kin do it still, if you wants me to stay wid you.” If he
refused to sign a contract, his mother warned him, he might forfeit his pay.
"Den I kin go somewheh else,” the ex-slave replied. 61

Rather than objecting to a specific clause, large numbers of freedmen
feared that the contract, as a binding legal agreement, compromised their
newly won liberties, and perhaps even forfeited their rights to the expected
distribution of land among them. In his section of Virginia, a Union officer
reported, the blacks refrained from contracting for any length of time "in
the expectation of some indefinable but great benefits to be bestowed on
them by the Government.” Nor would they place any great faith in the
employer’s assurance that the contract protected their best interests. The
freedmen lacked confidence "in the white man’s integrity, ” a Bureau com¬
missioner in Mississippi concluded, and the suspicion, other agents re¬
ported, often extended to "papers of any description, in which their former
masters are in any way concerned.” On Edisto Island, South Carolina,
several freedmen declared at a meeting with Federal officials that they
bore no personal enmity toward their old masters but they had no desire
to contract with men who had once owned and abused them, or even with

Back to Work: The New Dependency 415

those who might have treated them reasonably well but in whom they had
no confidence. 62

With numbers of ex-slaves refusing to sign contracts, many of them
hoping to obtain better terms, the planter class counted heavily on the
ultimate weapons of necessity and compulsion. To hasten that moment of
decision, Federal authorities complied all too readily with the demands of
planters that they apprehend black vagrants and cease issuing food rations
to freedmen, thereby forcing them to depend once again upon their old
masters for daily subsistence. Ironically, that policy accorded with the
growing conviction of the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern freedmen’s aid
societies that to distribute food and clothing among the ex-slaves made
them less independent, reduced their incentives to work, and demoralized
them. 'The most dangerous process through which the negro goes when he
becomes a freedman is that of receiving the gratuities of benevolence in the
shape of food and clothing,” a missionary wrote late in 1865. "If you wish
to make them impudent, fault-finding and lazy, give them clothing and food
freely.” Once the freedmen had to depend upon his bounty, the planter
reasoned, he had only to withhold such support to induce his laborers to
agree to terms. That proved to be a sound conclusion, though the results
were not always gratifying. When Stephen Doan, a South Carolina proprie¬
tor, decided to withhold food rations to force his men to abide by a contract,
they killed him. 63

To counter the freedman’s principal bargaining strength—the threat
to take his labor to the highest bidder—planters often effected combina¬
tions or understandings among themselves not to contract with any former
slave who failed to produce a "consent paper” or a proper discharge from
his previous owner. The white citizens of Nelson County, Virginia, acting
"to prevent improper interference with each other’s arrangements,” re¬
solved that "in no case ” would they hire a laborer who failed to supply "a
certificate of character, and of permission to rehire himself.” More often,
as in the Clarendon district of South Carolina, local planters simply
reached a verbal understanding "not to hire their neighbour’s negroes.” 64
Such an agreement, in one bold stroke, would effectively reduce the freed¬
man’s chances of either improving or changing his position, while it obvi¬
ously enhanced a planter’s ability to exact for himself the most favorable
terms. "The nigger is going to be made a serf, sure as you live,” vowed the
owner of a cotton factory and two plantations in Alabama.

It won’t need any law for that. Planters will have an understanding
among themselves: "You won’t hire my niggers, and I won’t hire yours”;
then what’s left for them? They’re attached to the soil, and we’re as much
their masters as ever. I’ll stake my life, this is the way it will work . 65

Appreciating the need to coordinate their efforts, planters in numer¬
ous regions also met to fix maximum wages, to draw up model contracts,

416

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

to agree on penalties for violations of contracts, and to pledge themselves
not to lease or rent any land to a freedman. Although the Freedmen’s
Bureau frowned upon such combinations and in some instances banned
them, local agents might choose to look the other way; after all, the ends
they wished to achieve were almost identical. In Clarke County, Alabama,
a Labor Regulating Association formed by local planters appeared to be on
good terms with the Bureau agent and hoped to obtain his approval for
apprenticing the orphan children of ex-slaves. But even where the Bureau
broke up such combinations, planters kept themselves informed of what
their neighbors were paying and paid no more. Still other pressures were
brought to bear on recalcitrant blacks. In a South Carolina community,
physicians agreed not to treat freedmen unless the planters authorized
their visits. 'They adopt this course,” a local resident explained, "to bring
to the notice of the negroes, their dependent condition & to check the
feeling of irresponsibility now prevalent.” And if other measures proved
unavailing, some employers, particularly in areas remote from a Freed¬
men’s Bureau office, had no hesitation in employing violent methods to
force their laborers to agree to terms. In Surrey County, Virginia, a black
farmer testified, "they are taking the colored people and tying them up by
the thumbs if they do not agree to work for six dollars a month; they tie
them up until they agree to work for that price, and then they make them
put their mark to a contract.... A man cannot endure it long.” In some
regions, patrols of white men meted out summary justice to blacks who
were not under contract to an employer or who were found to be in viola¬
tion of a contract. 66

Although the vast majority of freedmen eventually agreed to terms,
that hardly ended the difficulties. During the first postwar agricultural
season, with both sides testing the effects of emancipation, the reports
mounted of freedmen unable to appreciate the binding character of a con¬
tract and leaving the plantations "on the most trifling pretext” before their
terms of service had expired. (One planter still referred to such workers as
"runaways.”) "They are constantly striking for higher wages,” a Georgian
observed of the black laborers in his state.

The great difficulty is that they will not stick to a contract; they are fickle;
they are constantly expecting to do better; they will make a contract with
me to-day for twelve or fifteen dollars a month, and in a few days some¬
body will come along and offer a dollar or two more, and they will quit
me—never saying anything to me, but leave in the night and be gone.

The most persistent complaints revolved around those laborers who re¬
mained on the plantations, worked "only when they please, and as little as
they please,” feigned sickness to avoid labor, and had a habit of carrying
pistols with them to the fields (allegedly to shoot stray rabbits or squirrels).
Unaccustomed to black labor, a northern lessee and former abolitionist
who operated a plantation in Georgia found himself annoyed by the sight

Back to Work: The New Dependency

417

of laborers dropping their shovels and hoes in the fields to sing "a religious
song.” Still other employers fretted over the propensity of their workers to
do as little as possible in the expectation of "a better time coming —the
anticipated division of the land among the freedmen. 67 "Every contract
made in 1865 has been broken by the freedmen,” a Freedmen’s Bureau
agent reported from the Georgetown district of South Carolina, and one
local proprietor, Jane Pringle, derived little satisfaction from the willing¬
ness of Federal authorities to arrest and jail black violators: "Of what
earthly benefit is it to us that men who should be laboring are thrown mto
prison, they can’t till the land there and I assure you that a prison lde is
rather a pleasure to a negro than a punishment, since they are fed without
working.” As an alternative to the "tedious law process,” she proposed the
establishment of military posts "at small distances for instant relief and
"double labor on the land” as proper punishment. 68 .

No matter how explicitly a contract defined the freedmen s rights,
duties, and compensation, many laborers persisted in following their own
notions about how and when they wished to work. Although most freedmen
contracted to work a six-day week, many of them refused to labor for the
employer on Saturdays, preferring to confine their efforts to their own
garden plots and to household chores. More commonly, disputes arose over
whether freedmen were obliged to perform tasks not actually stipulated m
the contract. On a Georgia farm, for example, the refusal of a freedman to
work on Sunday precipitated a confrontation with his employer that re¬
quired the intervention of the Freedmen’s Bureau. By the terms of the
contract, he had agreed to perform "any and every duty that may, at any
time, be required,” including "the customary labors on the Sabbath such
as faring for the livestock. Claiming that he had "his own business to look
after, the freedman rejected Sunday work; when the farmer then insisted
on reading the contract to him, the laborer refused to listen, left the p see,
and took his case to the local Bureau agent, who immediately advised him
to return to work. But when his employer insisted that he now acknowl¬
edge the error and the commitment to work on Sunday, the freedman said
he "would promise nothing and agree to nothing.” To have to listen to such
"insolence” from a former slave proved to be more than many planters
could tolerate. When a freedman in low-country South Carolina insisted
that the contract did not oblige him to perform certain kinds of work, his
employer beat him over the head and shoulders with a club; on another
plantation, an employer shot a freedman who insisted upon consulting the
local Bureau agent about the interpretation of a certain clause in the
contract. The tenuous peace that existed in the aftermath of emancipation
could be easily broken over such matters, but with alarming regularity the
violence would not remain one-sided. 89

Whatever the constraints of a contract, the eagerness and determina¬
tion of black people to reunite their families and to regularize family
relations took precedence. For the planters, on the other hand, the need to
retain their labor force intact could not be compromised. On a plantation

418

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

in upper Georgia, William Henry Stiles thus rejected the plea of a former
slave (who had fled during the war) that he be permitted to take his wife
with him to Savannah; the planter countered that he needed her labor and
he intended to hold her to the contract that bound her to his place until
the end of the year. Nor would a Louisiana planter assent to the request
of an elderly black woman who wished to be paid so she could move to
another place and be closer to her husband. "Don’t you know that you
contracted with me for a year?” he asked her. "Don’t know nuffin about it.
I wants to go ’way,” she replied. But the planter remained unyielding, and
the law clearly backed him. "Well, I’m keeping my part of the contract, and
you’ve got to keep yours,” he warned the woman. "If you don’t, I’ll send you
to jail, that’s all.” 70

Although claiming that the ignorant and backward Negro could not be
made to respect the sanctity of a written agreement, employers were not
necessarily the innocent victims of black deceit. If the contract stipulated
food rations, for example, it guaranteed neither the quality nor the quan¬
tity of the food. That was "de fust dif’culty,” a South Carolina freedman
contended when asked about contract violations, "we gits no meat.” Inves¬
tigating a disturbance on a plantation in the Beaufort district, the Freed-
men’s Bureau agent reported that the laborers thought their employer to
be dishonest, and they complained of overwork and being fed "musty” com
and "rotten” bacon. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau threatened to disal¬
low contracts which empowered employers to use corporal pun i s hm ent,
that did not protect the freedmen from other forms of abuse. After being
berated for negligence, a Mississippi freedman replied that he was a free
man, he refused to be insulted as though he were still a slave, and he left.
His decision could not have been made lightly. Not only did he face arrest
and prosecution for violating the contract but he lost his remaining pay. 71

The thought occurred to more than one planter that a way to avoid
paying his laborers was to provoke them to break the contract near the end
of the season. Asked to explain "the real cause” of labor turbulence in his
area, a black worker who lived near Florence, South Carolina, singled out
that particular grievance.

Well, sah, there’s a many masters as wants to git de colored peoples away,
ye see; an’ dey’s got de contrac’s, an’ dey can’t do it, ye see, lawful; so dey
’buses dem, an’ jerks ’em up by de two fums, an’ don’t give ’em de bacon,
an’ calls on ’em to do work in de night time an’ Sun’ay, till de colored
people dey gits oneasy an’ goes-off.

On a Mississippi plantation, the manager expelled some blacks who had
expressed dissatisfaction over working conditions, refusing to pay them for
the three months they had already labored. (The Bureau agent ordered
their reinstatement.) And in South Carolina, Martin Delany heard numer¬
ous complaints that near the completion of the crop, the employer brought
"some frivolous” charge against freedmen and discharged them, thereby

419

Back to Work: The New Dependency

making them forfeit their share of the forthcoming division of the crop. The
practice reached such proportions, in fact, that the Freedmen’s Bureau
found it necessary to require that employers show "sufficient cause” before
discharging contracted laborers and pay them what they had earned.
When one Bureau agent tried to explain this policy to local planters, he
reported that they found it "quite incomprehensible from the old-fash¬
ioned, patriarchal point of view.” 72

Although the Freedmen’s Bureau insisted that both planters and la¬
borers comply with contract terms, local agents thought their primary
mission was to keep the blacks at work and punish them for violations.
"Doing justice,” an observer sympathetic to the blacks reported, "seems to
mean ... seeing that the blacks don’t break contract and compelling them
to submit cheerfully if the whites do.” Nothing seemed to disturb Bureau
agents more about the postwar black "migration” than the tendency of
freedmen to leave employers with whom they had agreed to complete the
current crop. Consistent with their vigorous suppression of black vagrancy
and their regular pronouncements on the necessity of labor, Bureau offi¬
cials impressed upon blacks the sanctity of contracts and moved quickly to
apprehend non-signers and violators as vagrants. While employers might
be reprimanded or even fined for violating a contract, the freedman usually
found himself in far deeper trouble, perhaps incarcerated for a period of
time or forced to work on the public roads without pay. After a "contrary”
freedman in a Florida community spent a week in jail on a diet of bread
and water, he was said by the local Bureau agent to have been "very
willing” to return to the fields. If evidence reached the nearest office of the
Freedmen’s Bureau that laborers had left a plantation, refused to contract
or work, or were creating a disturbance, that was all the agent needed to
know to justify his intervention, with troops if he deemed them necessary.
Upon hearing that some freedmen near Meridian, Mississippi, had left
their jobs for "frivolous and insufficient causes,” the Bureau agent re¬
quested the names of the "guilty” parties and ordered their arrest. In many
instances, Bureau officials acted in good conscience to exact a fair settle¬
ment of the grievances which had required their intervention but seldom
would they tolerate any violation of a contract, no matter how relatively
trivial the nature of the offense or how unreasonable the contract. 73

The Freedmen’s Bureau defended its policies in the name of stabilizing
labor relations. But the overly zealous commitment of its agents to the
inviolability of contracts and the double standard they often applied in
enforcement and in the punishment of offenders proved of immeasurable
benefit to the employers. After reviewing the work of the Bureau, a conser¬
vative Memphis newspaper could not help but applaud its accomplish¬
ments: "The chaotic condition of the labor system is being reduced to order.
It gives the employer the means of compelling the fulfillment of engage¬
ments on the part of the employee.” Such intervention was particularly
welcomed in the initial experiments with contract labor, when violations
and plantation disturbances loomed as a critical test of the entire labor

420

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

system. The need to make examples of "turbulent negroes,” lest they influ¬
ence others to "go astray,” seemed all the more urgent. When two of his
contracted freedmen fled "without any provocation,” Lorenzo James, an
Alabama planter, wished to have them arrested, punished severely, and
sent back "as an example to those remaining.” He knew precisely in what
terms to frame his appeal to the Freedmen’s Bureau for assistance:

There is every reason to believe that these two negroes were induced to
leave by the other negroes, to test this question and see if any punish¬
ment could be inflicted upon them for a violation of their contract. If they
go unpunished, it will have a very bad effect upon, not only my planta¬
tion, but upon the surrounding country; and if they are allowed to violate
a contract made in good faith whenever they see fit to do so, the agricul¬
tural interest throughout the country must necessarily suffer to a very
great extent.

His friendship with the Bureau’s regional commissioner no doubt helped
to ensure prompt compliance with his request. 74

The sanctity of contracts proved of little avail to the freedmen on the
day they settled their accounts with the employer. With the approach of
Christmas each year and the division of the crop and the final wage pay¬
ment, the dire predictions of "a heap o’ trouble” proved all too prophetic.
"They’ll be awfully defrauded,” a Virginia poor white thought, perhaps
reflecting his own experiences with the planter class. "I know houses yer
whar they keep a nigger till his month’s most out, and then they make a
muss with him, and kick him out without any wages. Poor men like me has
got to pay for it. Of course, if they don’t pay, the niggers can’t keep them¬
selves, and it’ll come on us. They’ll be cheated all kinds o’ ways. Don’t I
know it?” 75

If his newly freed slaves remained with him until the end of the season,
a Tennessee planter promised, they would be awarded a share of the crop.
"Most of them left,” Lorenzo Ivy recalled; "they said they knew him too
well.” But this sixteen-year-old black youth and his father stayed on and
worked "just as if Lee hadn’t surrendered.” By Christmas 1865, they had
raised a large crop of com, wheat, and tobacco, they had shucked the corn
and stored it in the barn, and they had stripped all the tobacco. "I never
worked harder in my life, for I thought the more we made, the more we
would get.” But when the two freedmen stood before their former master
to obtain the promised shares, he refused to pay them anything, declared
he could no longer support them, and ordered them off his land. Thinking
few grievances could be more legitimate or clear-cut, they appealed to the

Back to Work: The New Dependency

421

local officer of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He refused to help them. "The
officer/’ Lorenzo Ivy recalled, "was like Isaac said to Esau: 'The voice is like
Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.’ So that was the way
with the officer—he had on Uncle Sam’s clothes, but he had Uncle Jeff’s
heart.” 76

Large numbers of freedmen shared the experience of Lorenzo Ivy and
his father. With the completion of the crops, some planters defaulted on
promised payments or pleaded inability to pay, and still more reduced the
payments drastically through arbitrary and inflated deductions. The ini¬
tial victims were ex-slaves like the Ivys who had agreed to stay on after
emancipation in return for a share of the crop. But now they were left with
nothing, and even driven from the plantation. When the Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau launched its operations, local agents found their offices besieged by
blacks testifying to the extent and persistence of this grievance. "The old
story has been repeated thousands of times,” one officer reported, "no
definite bargain made—no wages promised; but 'massa said, stay till the
crop is made and he would do what was right.’ ” That proved to be the
downfall of many a freedman. Popular in verbal understa n d in gs though
seldom written into contracts, the employer’s promise to pay his laborers
"what was right” left him free to pay them nothing or very little; indeed,
he might even persuade himself that to pay his workers any more could
only demoralize them and encourage indulgences not befitting inferiors.
The Mississippi planter who deprived his ex-slaves of the crop shares he
had promised still thought of himself as an honest man; he simply pre¬
sumed, a neighbor said ofhim, that northern capitalists always treated free
laborers in this way. 77

If the planter pleaded financial poverty and indebtedness, he might
place the blame on falling cotton prices, a bad crop, or the slovenly work
habits ofhis laborers. Not uncommonly, an employer would charge that the
work ofhis blacks had not even paid for the food he gave them. The problem
with confessing an inability to pay, even when justified, was that few ofhis
laborers chose to believe him. And if they did believe him, why should they
work for him another year on the vague assurance that conditions would
improve? That made no sense at all. The "impoverished” planter might
discover soon enough that he had become an undesirable risk among all the
freedmen in the vicinity, even more so if they suspected him of deceit or
fraud. The much-heralded contract, moreover, seemed less than sacrosanct
when it denied them the very fruits of their labor. Such initial experiences,
a black man wrote from Helena, Arkansas, in early 1866, would not be soon
forgotten. "They may cheat the poor negro out of a year’s work, but in spite
of them he has gained a year’s experience, and had the advantage of being
thoroughly acquainted with that system of morals, that teaches the negro
to observe and fulfill the moral obligations of a contract, but has no mean¬
ing or significance when applied to the white man.” 78

Although most employers agreed to compensate their laborers on the
basis of the contract, the annual settlement of accounts, in itself an un-

422

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

precedented event, produced new disappointments, angry confrontations,
and near rebellion on some places. Even as the freedmen eagerly looked
forward to this day, the employer found it unnerving if not downright
humiliating. "Staid on New Hope Plantation all day preparing to settle
with the Negroes,” a Louisiana planter confided to his diary. "I had almost
as lief be shot as to do it, but it must be done.” Equally depressed, Wilmer
Shields, who had managed several plantations through a turbulent war¬
time experience, anticipated nothing but trouble as the dreaded payday
approached. "I do not expect to satisfy any of them,” he informed the
owner, "for each one seems to think his share will be a fortune.” Whatever
the planter’s financial position, he came to look upon this day as an un¬
avoidable ordeal. Unaccustomed to dealing with blacks over such matters,
his demeanor was all too likely to crack under the torrent of complaints
and challenges—what a South Carolina planter described as "the most
gross abuse.” 79

But to the ex-slave, "countin’ day” set off his new status from the old,
and his expectations were high—almost always too high. Outside the main
house the freedmen would assemble and face the table where the planter
or his agent sat, holding in his hands the payroll and store book. As each
laborer heard his name called, he would step forward to be informed of the
number of days he had worked, the debts he had accumulated, the fines
assessed against him, and the precise amount he had earned after deduc¬
tions. That was when the trouble began. If he barely comprehended the
often complicated balancing of debts and earnings, he understood the final
sum soon enough, his face suddenly assuming an expression of utter dis¬
may and incredulity. "Ain’t got nary a hundud dollars! Ain’t got nary a
hundud dollars! Done wucked all de year an’ ain’t got nary a hundud
dollars!” a Florida freedwoman kept shouting, waving the dollar bills
wildly above her head. On a Louisiana plantation, one of the laborers
thought there had to be a mistake: "I done wuck mighty hard fo’ you, chop
briars and roll logs, and you haint paid me nuffin at all.” On a Georgia
plantation, the laborers failed to discern any relationship between what
they had been paid and the labor they had performed.

Ole mass’r had ’greed to give we one tird de craps, an* we dun got 'em
all up,—got de corn shucked, an' de tatees digged, and de rice trashed;
an’ ole mass’r he dun gone sold all de craps, an' he bringed we all up yere
yes’erday, an’ gif we seven dollar fur de man an’ he wife to buy de cloth
wid to make we clofes, an’ he say may be he gif we some shoes; an’ he
dun gif we’n none o’ de craps, none o’ de rice, none o’ de corn, none o’ de
tatees.

The same incomprehension gripped the laborers on the Butler plantation
in Georgia, each one convinced he had been cheated, invariably greeting
his payment with some variation of the remark: "Well, well, work for
massa two whole years, and only get dis much.” 80

Back to Work: The New Dependency

423

Puzzled, bitter, angry over the settlement, the freedmen might insist
that their employer had erred in his calculations. If he deigned to respond
to such charges, he would hold up the ledger and explain to his laborers
how the advances of food, clothing, seed, tools, and fuel, in addition to other
deductions, had consumed the greater part of their wages or shares. He
would remind them of the items they had purchased and the number of
days they had lost because of illness. He might even scold them for their
thriftlessness and indulgences. "Now, auntie, you have a right to spend
your earnings any way you please; you're free. It’s none of my business
what you do with your money. But if you would let me give you a little
advice, I’d tell you all not to waste your money on fish, and candy, and
rings, and breastpins, and fine hats. If you will have them, well sell them
to you, but you had better not buy so freely." Denying any intent to deceive
his laborers, the employer would contend in this instance and others that
he had simply enforced the contract, which stipulated the amount of com¬
pensation and enumerated the deductions. 81

Unfortunately, the contract said nothing about the cost of the provi¬
sions the employer agreed to furnish his laborers. Although the culprit
may have been the supply merchant rather than the planter, the fact
remained that provisions were sold at highly inflated prices and the laborer
had no recourse but to trade where he could obtain credit. "I have neigh¬
bors," a Mississippi planter conceded, "who keep stores of plain goods and
fancy articles for their people; and, let a nigger work ever so hard, and earn
ever so high wages, he is sure to come out in debt at the end of the year."
Even if the laborer could understand the deductions for actual purchases,
he found far less comprehensible if not fraudulent the fines for negligence,
the number of days or hours allegedly absent from work, and even in some
cases charges for items like bagging and ropes; in Mississippi, planters
reportedly gave "presents" to certain laborers during the season to acceler¬
ate the pace of work and then charged the cost of these gifts to their
accounts. After the various deductions and charges had been assessed, the
most brutal truth that greeted the laborer on the long-awaited "countin'
day” was that he stood in debt to the planter! That revelation created such
a reaction on a Virginia plantation that the employer, fearing trouble,
agreed to pay a token amount ($2 to $5) to each worker. 82

No matter how carefully his employer explained the situation, the
laborer still found it difficult to understand why his months of hard work
should have left him with so little or actually in debt. After what seemed
like endless disputations over each settlement, Frances Butler thought it
useless to argue any further; henceforth, she would pay her father’s labor¬
ers and refuse to discuss the matter. Besides, she had concluded that the
freedmen indulged in these discussions not because they thought they had
been cheated but only "with an idea of asserting their independence and
dignity." If an aggrieved laborer appealed his case to the Freedmen's Bu¬
reau, and many did, he might obtain a measure of relief—but only after
proving he had been defrauded. That obstacle proved insurmountable, with

424

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the plantation ledger winning out easily over the freedman’s recollections,
as it would have in any court of law. Even the most sympathetic Bureau
officials confessed their helplessness in such cases. Thomas H. Norton, who
supervised freedmen’s affairs in Meridian, Mississippi, suspected that
man y blacks had been "meanly defrauded” of their earnings and he could
readily understand their discouragement. But he could offer them little but
his sympathy.

Whenever cases of this kind are presented to the Sub Commissioner for
investigation he will find himself involved in such a "Milky Way” of
figures, admissions and denials, criminations and recriminations, that it
will be almost impossible, considering the length of time that has elapsed,
and the inability of the freedmen to bring the necessary witnesses to
testify to their statements, to arrive at any just conclusion or settlement
of the case . 83

A Bureau officer in South Carolina, John William De Forest, recalled how
exasperated he became after arbitrating "a hundred or two” such cases,
spending in some instances "an entire forenoon” trying to convince a la¬
borer that his employer had not cheated him. "I read to him, out of the
planter’s admirably kept books, every item of debit and credit: so much
meal, bacon, and tobacco furnished, with the dates of each delivery of the
same; so many bushels of corn and peas and bunches of'fodder’ harvested.
He admitted every item, admitted the prices affixed; and then, puzzled,
incredulous, stubborn, denied the totals.” Meanwhile, the laborer’s wife
stood next to him, "trembling with indignant suspicion,” until she could
contain herself no longer. "Don’ you give down to it, Peter,” she exhorted
her husband. "It ain’t no how ris’ible that we should ’a’ worked all the year
and git nothin’ to go upon.” But it was no use. The Bureau agent finally
advised the couple to throw themselves upon "the generosity” of their
employer. 84

If the experience of payday exhausted planters and exasperated Bu¬
reau officials, it left the freedmen disillusioned, frustrated, and outraged
—and in many cases penniless if not in debt. But no matter how hard they
tried or to whom they appealed, there was simply no way to make the
figures come out differently. "The darkey don’t understand it,” a Missis¬
sippi planter remarked, "he has kept no accounts; but he knows he has
worked hard and got nothing. He won’t hire to that man again.” The
thousands of freedmen who left at the expiration of the contract often cited
as the principal reason their dissatisfaction over the final settlement. "I’m
willin’ to wu’k, sah, and I want to wu’k, ’cos I’m mighty ill off,” a Virginia
freedman declared, but after his employer had reneged on a promised half
of the crop he resolved not to work another year "till I knows I’m gwine
to get paid at the end of it.” Wherever they chose to contract for the next
year, including the places on which they had worked, freedmen evinced a
determination to do so only after some hard bargaining. "We all gits fooled

Back to Work: The New Dependency

425

on dat first go-out!” Katie Rowe recalled, but the following year "we all got
something left over.” Nor would the freedmen necessarily confine them¬
selves in future confrontations to a refinement of their verbal skills. On
Edisto Island, for example, the blacks who worked the Rabbit Point planta¬
tion found a different way to make certain that the division of the crops
reflected the labor they had expended.

The moment the Cotton house was opened the people rushed in and a
number of them took forcible possession of their cotton and carried it off
without division and all refused to allow any division to take place,
threatened to knock my brains out and forcibly resisted me. Not having
any force at my command I was obliged to close the house and await the
arrival of a guard . 85

With the end of each agricultural season, the tenuous peace that had
existed on the plantations suddenly seemed more precarious. The wage
settlement, the division of the crops, the need to negotiate new contracts,
and the persistent expectations of a land division pitted laborers against
employers in ways that violated accepted customs and threatened to under¬
mine the prevailing racial code. Both whites and blacks would have to
contend with the fear that traditional antagonisms of race, now aggravated
by a new kind of class conflict, might at any time assume more violent
forms. Each Christmas season somehow occasioned a new alarm.

Although discerning few changes in his laborers, Donald MacRae, a
North Carolina merchant, conceded in September 1865 a widespread sense
of uneasiness in the white population. He suspected that the source of the
anxiety lay in the expectation of blacks that they would ultimately share
in if not possess entirely the lands and goods of their former masters. That
expectation had become so pervasive, MacRae believed, that the disap¬
pointment, when it came, could only produce the most dreaded of conse¬
quences—a black uprising. Fortunately, the local military commander had
warned the freedmen not to entertain or act upon such foolish notions.
"This may quiet it down,” MacRae thought. But if it did not, he anticipated
an insurrection that would exceed the worst horrors of the Civil War, "for
total annihilation would be the war cry on both sides.” Preparing for such
an eventuality, Ethelred Philips, the Florida farmer and physician, decided
to teach his wife, "timid as she has always been,” to use a revolver. "She
took the first lesson a few days ago with a rifle and was delighted to find
shooting so easy, and when she saw the ball had struck in a few inches of
the mark she was quite encouraged, tho she had spoiled her sleeve by the

426

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

powder_She shall become a sure shot—how many hours of fright may

be avoided when a woman feels she holds her safety in her own hand.” 86

The approach of the Christmas holiday in 1865, coinciding as it did
with payday, new contract talks, and new land expectations, produced the
first major postwar insurrection panic. Now that the blacks were no longer
bound by the old restraints, many whites feared they would vent their
frustrations and disillusionment over the betrayal of expectations by
plunging the South into a racial holocaust. "If they dont massacre the
white Race, it is not because the desire dont exist,” a South Carolina
Unionist observed as he appealed to President Johnson to provide whites
with the means to protect themselves from the fury of a race that had
become "worse than Bevels.” Newspapers fed the prevailing anxiety by
claiming exclusive knowledge of sinister plots. "We speak advisedly,” one
of them warned, "we have authentic information of the speeches and con¬
versations of the blacks, sufficient to convince us of their purpose. They
make no secret of their movement Tell us not that we are alarmists.” For
many whites, however, the idea of black insurrection had become such a
self-fulfilling prophecy that they needed no fire-eating editors to tell them
what they had long suspected would flow naturally out of emancipation. "It
will begin the work of extermination,” sighed a South Carolina planter,
without indicating which race he expected to survive. 87

With imaginations running rampant, whites found no difficulty in
conjuring up horrors and demons befitting the expected bloodbath. The
slightest change in a freedman’s demeanor, the most trivial incident, the
most innocent display of independence could trigger new rumors and fears.
The mistress of a plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, had only to
listen to the freedmen singing in their quarters—"as only they could sing
in these times”—to imagine "a horde pouring into our houses to cut our
throats and dance like fiends over our remains.” The sight of his former
slaves "talking together, sometimes in whispers and sometimes loudly,”
ignoring his orders to retire to their cabins by the curfew hour, prompted
a Georgian to suspect "conspiracies” and to fear "an outbreak every mo¬
ment.” Near Fort Motte, South Carolina, a young planter who had served
in the war heard that his blacks planned to attack the barns later in the
month; in the meantime, he encountered only their "sour looks” and "un¬
civil words.” One day, he watched as they carried out his order to slaughter
some hogs. He found the scene disturbing, impossible to forget. The next
day, he still "shuddered” as he recalled "the fiendish eagerness” the blacks
had evinced "to stab & kill, the delight in the suffering of others.” 88

In their fevered minds that fall and winter, whites fanned the flames
of the conflagration they had largely created themselves. The black man
moving through the woods hunting squirrels suddenly became thousands
of armed blacks hunting their old masters. The Mississippi planter missing
for several days was presumably a victim of murderous blacks, several of
whom were arrested and threatened with a lynching until the "martyr”

Back to Work: The New Dependency

427

returned home after an extended stay "with some prostitutes.” The Yan¬
kee soldier who answered the summons of a planter distraught over suspi¬
cious black movements was himself mistaken for one of the rebels and shot
and killed. The gatherings ofblacks to plan for the forthcoming Emancipa¬
tion Day celebration on January 1 found their way into the conversations
and newspapers of whites as meetings to complete the plans for an upris¬
ing. The rusty army musket discovered in a freedman’s cabin became
overnight a vast arsenal to supply the arms for the revolt. Even blacks at
work in the fields could be projected into guerrilla armies wielding their
spades, pitchforks, and scythes to kill their masters and seize the lands they
had been denied. The most persistent rumors stemmed from reports of
armed blacks drilling for the coming showdown, but Federal investigators
found in one instance a group of young freedmen playing soldier with sticks
and unserviceable army rifles, while in another the blacks had, indeed,
armed themselves—in fear of a white insurrection. 89

Much as they had at the outbreak of the war, native whites tried to
project a feeling of confidence. Even as Eliza Andrews prepared for a race
war, with the tales of the Sepoys, Lucknow, and Cawnpore still quite vivid
in her mind, she claimed in June 1865 to have conquered much of the
anxiety she had once felt. "Now, when I know that I am standing on a
volcano that may burst forth any day, I somehow, do not feel frightened.
It seems as if nothing worse could happen than the South has already been
through, and I am ready for anything, no matter what comes.” Despite the
fears of imminent insurrection, Pierce Butler left his daughter and her
maid alone on St. Simon’s Island with no white person within eight miles,
as if to demonstrate the confidence he still reposed in his former slaves. At
least, that was how his daughter, Frances, interpreted his action, and she
shared his equanimity. "Neither then nor afterwards,” she wrote, "when
I was alone on the plantation with the negroes for weeks at a time, had I
the slightest feeling of fear, except one night, when I had a fright which
made me quite ill for two days.” The momentary panic had been triggered
by a noise emanating from a raft loaded down with mules. Even after
discovering the source of the clamor, she recalled, "I had been too terrified
to laugh.” But if Frances Leigh still enjoyed a feeling of relative security,
the many letters and conversations that passed between whites in this
period revealed considerable anguish and a growing fear that "no planta¬
tion will be a safe residence this Winter.” 90

Fear of insurrection had a long tradition in the South. The new hyste¬
ria fed largely on emancipation, black disenchantment with the meager
economic rewards of freedom, and the knowledge that tens of thousands of
ex-slaves had come into possession of firearms. "Our negroes certainly have
guns and are frequently shooting about,” the Reverend Samuel A. Agnew
of Mississippi observed in November 1865. "Brice had some women go
to Corinth recently and they have returned bringing, it is said, ammuni¬
tion. A good many look for trouble about Christmas.” When local whites

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disarmed the blacks later that month, Agnew noted that some of the freed-
men were "in high dudgeon” over this action, claiming they now had
"equal rights with a white man to bear arms.” The reports of armed blacks
were not necessarily exaggerated. With emancipation, large numbers of
freedmen had acquired the weapons denied to them as slaves. "These guns
they prize as their most valued possessions next to their land,” a Bureau
agent reported from the Sea Islands, "and to take them away would leave
a lasting and bitter resentment, and sense of injustice.” 91 But that was
precisely what the whites intended to do, refusing to believe that when
laborers carried weapons into the fields with them they wished only to
shoot at stray rabbits and squirrels. Heeding the popular outcry, state
governors ordered the militias to patrol the countryside and disarm blacks,
legislatures rewrote and strengthened patrol laws, towns authorized the
employment of additional police, and planters urged the white citizenry to
fill the ranks of the militia. Although some Union Army officers and Bu¬
reau agents tried to calm the populace, perhaps as many shared the pre¬
vailing fears and cooperated with civil authorities and volunteer patrols to
search the homes of blacks for guns. The occasional discovery of a cache
of arms confirmed the worst fears and intensified the campaign to disarm
the black population. In the Wilmington district of North Carolina, the
Union commander went so far as to urge white citizens to form voluntary
military companies as a precaution against the feared black uprising, and
he promised them arms and ammunition as well as "the entire power at
his command.” 92

Although whites verged on panic, some moving their families to safer
areas, many others volunteering for local patrols, none looked upon the
rumors of impending insurrection with greater apprehension than the
freedmen themselves. Previous experience had revealed all too vividly that
whites had a way of exorcising imagined black demons by exterminating
those within reach who most closely resembled them. And the purgation
—with the inevitable floggings, beatings, and assassinations—would most
likely exceed in brutality the terrors which whites had concocted in antici¬
pation of a black uprising. Unaware of conspiracies in their midst, realizing
the false basis of white fears, drawing upon their own intimate knowledge
of the white man, some blacks concluded—logically enough—that the fear
of insurrection served only the purposes of their former masters, providing
them with the opportunity to invade their homes, to seize their weapons,
to make examples of their leaders, and to otherwise terrorize and harass
them until they revised their notions about the perquisites of freedom. 93
When the white citizens of two Louisiana parishes appealed to the governor
for arms, ammunition, and the authority to organize for "self preserva¬
tion,” they cited the urgent need "to overawe the colored population, and
thereby avoid the effusion of blood and all the horrors of a cruel insurrec¬
tion.” To force blacks to stand in awe of the white man had of course been
a vital ingredient of racial control under slavery. With that memory of

Back to Work: The New Dependency

429

bondage still vivid in their minds, blacks in some areas began to drill
and accumulate arms in preparation for any eventuality. "We’ns smart
nuff t’ hold ’r own,” a South Carolina freedman remarked, and the repor¬
ter who heard him thought the optimism justified. "Moreover,” the re¬
porter observed, "the whites of all these low-country districts know that
fact, too.” 84

On the night of December 27,1865, the widowed mistress of a planta¬
tion in the interior of Georgia sat up until after midnight, "fearing that
something sad must occur with so many freedmen about me.” But the night
passed "and with it all my fears.” Throughout the South, Christmas passed
without the slightest hint of a contemplated black uprising. Only a few
sporadic incidents, almost all of them provoked by overzealous whites,
disturbed an otherwise quiet and orderly holiday season. Federal author¬
ities who took the time to investigate the many rumors of black military
preparations found no justification for white fears, only a few organizations
that blacks had formed for self-defense and with which they hoped to
advance their prospects in the forthcoming negotiation of contracts. Per¬
haps the vigilance of the white community, the vigorous patrolling of the
countryside, and the presence of reinforced police, militias, and volunteer
patrols had saved the white South from a certain conflagration. Some
whites began to suspect that was not the case, that the victory had been
something of a sham. "It appears that there has been a great alarm without
any cause,” the Reverend Samuel A. Agnew of Mississippi confided to his
diary; the many reports of imminent insurrection, he now concluded, "were
only the creations of the imaginations of timid people.” The white hysteria
and the extraordinary measures it had provoked, he thought, might in
their own way have constituted a tactical victory for the blacks. "As affair s
have turned out the negroes must think that the white people are afraid
of them.” 95

Although the fears of insurrection proved to be unfounded, whites
could never quite surmount them. The circumstances which had fed the
rumors would persist. During the next several years, any new epidemic of
restlessness, any new manifestation of discontent, any new report ofblack
organization would precipitate still another crisis. If anything, the fears
would take on even more lurid dimensions, no doubt reflecting growing
apprehension over black political power. As the Christmas season of 1866
approached, James R. Sparkman, a plantation proprietor in South
Carolina, shared his apprehensions with a long-time friend. While in town
recently, he had attended "a secret conference” at which three "respectable
citizens” described "an insurrectionary movement, wide spread, and terri¬
ble in its plot.” Within the next two months, the blacks planned to rise on
a certain night and massacre the male adults and children, while retaining
many of the females "for servile and licentious purposes.” By 1868, even
Frances Leigh’s confidence and equanimity had ebbed considerably. If in
1865 she had felt, "not the slightest” fear of the blacks on the Butler

430

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

plantations, three years later she refused to sleep without a loaded pistol
by her bed.

Their whole manner was changed; they took to calling their former
owners by their last name without any title before it, constantly spoke

of my agent as old R-, dropped the pleasant term of "Mistress,” took

to calling me "Miss Fanny,” walked about with guns upon their shoul¬
ders, worked just as much and when they pleased, and tried speaking to
me with their hats on, or not touching them to me when they passed me
on the banks. This last rudeness I never permitted for a moment.

Frances Leigh thought that if she relaxed her vigilance for even a moment,
she would lose control over the blacks altogether. For the next two years,
she recalled, "I felt the whole time that it was touch-and-go whether I or
the negroes got the upper hand.” 96

It was not as though the blacks had no reason to revolt. Even as they
persisted in testing their freedom, they had not succeeded in breaking the
bonds that tied them to the farms and plantations as agricultural laborers.
That had to be the uppermost thought in their minds after each settlement,
about the same time whites were fashioning new notions of conspiracy and
rebellion. On New Year’s Day 1866, black people commemorated emanci¬
pation, not by overturning their masters in a violent upheaval, but by
attending appropriate ceremonies and listening to appropriate speeches. In
Charleston, more than ten thousand assembled at the racecourse to hear
their "best friends” advise them on future prospects. General Rufus Saxton
implored them to be honest, industrious, and sober; if they wanted land,
they would have to work for it, filling their pockets with greenbacks until
they had enough to purchase a lot. Colonel Ketchum counseled them to
emulate their brethren on Edisto Island who had met the loss of their lands
with "remarkable dignity.” But easily the most stirring moments that day
belonged to Colonel Trowbridge, the commander of a black regiment, who
took the stand to bid an emotional farewell to his soldiers, most of whom
were about to be discharged. When he finished, the large crowd sat "hushed
and silent” for several minutes until a voice rang out:

Blow ye the trumpet, blow!

The gladly solemn sound .

The entire throng then joined in the singing, reaching a loud crescendo as
they came to the refrain:

The year of jubilee has come ,

Return, ye ransomed sinners, home . 97

With the speeches and songs of Emancipation Day still ringing in their
ears, the blacks returned to their respective places and prepared to work
the fields of the white man for still another year.

Less than two weeks after dismissing the talk of insurrection as the
product of white hysteria, the Reverend Samuel A. Agnew found the labor¬
ers on his father’s plantation in Mississippi to be "disobedient, idle and
puffed up with an idea of their own excellence.” After receiving their
shares from the sale of the crops, the blacks were "disinclined” to commit
their entire time for still another year. "They have exalted ideas,” Agnew
wrote in disgust. On the several plantations in Louisiana managed by
Wilmer Shields, the laborers held back on signing a new contract and
refused to reveal their intentions. When they assembled one Sunday "to
express themselves” on the matter, Shields thought their propositions "too
absurd and inadmissible to be repeated.” Although Adele Allston had
managed to repossess her plantations earlier that year, the approach of
December found her pessimistic about future prospects. No matter what
she said or did, it all seemed in vain. None of the blacks wished to contract
for another year, and even Milly, a servant who had been with her for many
years, "is tired being good and faithful. She appears discontented. It seems
to me she wants the whole of the stock, the profits of it at least.” Upon
investigating conditions in the South Carolina low country, a Freedmen’s
Bureau agent found the planters "uniformly ready and anxious” to con¬
tract but the freedmen almost all refused, except "upon such terms as the
Bureau cannot justly require” of the employers. 98

With the completion of the crops, the labor system seemed destined
each year to undergo a new series of convulsions, many of them precipi¬
tated by those persistent visions of land distribution, independent farming,
and higher wages. Although the ultimately compelling need to test the
boundaries of freedom surfaced at different times for different blacks, it
continually frustrated any regularization of labor relations. Thousands of
freedmen, including many who had stayed on with their old masters after
emancipation, would now seek places elsewhere, leaving "in squads of five
or ten at a time” and sometimes in sufficient numbers to render entire
plantations and farms devoid of laborers. Such movements, for example,
virtually sealed the fate of the rice industry in South Carolina. 99 The
familiar refrain "Every Negro has left us” once again punctuated the
letters, private journals, and conversations of the former slaveholding
class. The element of surprise seemed less pronounced now in view of the
shared experiences of so many white families, though many who had sur¬
vived the wartime and post-emancipation departures were to awaken one
morning to find none of their laborers and servants present. On the Pine
Hill plantation in Florida, Christmas had been a traditionally festive occa¬
sion, involving considerable interchange between the white and black fami¬
lies. But in 1865 the white family sensed a difference. When the blacks
came to the Big House to pick up their gifts, they did so with little of the

432

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

old enthusiasm, and, uncharacteristically, they quickly returned to their
quarters. On the surface, at least, the plantation appeared to be peaceful,
free of the fears of insurrection that had unsettled other regions, and the
servants had performed their duties faithfully. "Adeline cooked us an
elegant Christmas dinner and Bill served it to perfection. Each man and
maid were in place, attending to their various duties, but the atmosphere
of merriment and good-will was lacking.” Within the month, Adeline and
Bill, along with the other blacks, departed, leaving the white folks "all
alone on the hill.” 100

The need to break away from the places where they had served as
slaves still had a way of overcoming specific economic considerations. Nev¬
ertheless, disillusionment over the paltry rewards of the first years of free
labor added considerable impetus to the desire for some kind of change.
"We worked hard for two years and didn’t make nothing by contracts,” a
black family in Georgia declared; "we are now gwine to try it ourselves.”
And like a growing number of ex-slaves, they had resolved to improve their
situation by moving into town. "Even the cornfield negro has a great dislike
to go into the field,” a white physician in Atlanta, Georgia, observed in
early 1866; "he wants to get into the towns and do little errands and jobs.
They have, as a class, a great thirst for the towns and cities; they like
company; they are very social creatures—like to job about during the day,
and be where they can go to a party at night.” The principal attractions
of the city remained the greater feeling of security it afforded and the
chances for more remunerative employment and a more active social life.
Even if the freedman did not move into an urban center, he often preferred
to contract on a plantation nearby, so as to be in a position to enjoy the
advantages of a town while still performing the kind of labor he knew best.
After an unsuccessful attempt to hire laborers in Vicksburg, a Mississippi
planter conceded his problems might have been minimal if he could have
picked up his plantation and moved it closer to the city. Still another
disappointed employer came away convinced "the black rascals wouldn’t
trust themselves the width of my plantation away from town for fear I
would eat ’em up.” 101

Whether the freedman moved or not, the end of each agricultural
season set off a new round of contract talks, invariably preceded by an
employer’s complaint that his hands "positively” refused to agree to terms.
During the negotiations, employers would learn soon enough how success¬
fully they had placated their working force over the past year; indeed, that
was precisely why these annual talks took on such importance for the
freedmen, not only as a way to better their terms but for the rare opportu¬
nity it afforded them to express their grievances and suggest how condi¬
tions might be improved. In settling the accounts with the laborers on the
Butler plantations, Frances Leigh had learned not to respond to their
exclamations of doubt and disapproval. But when it came to negotiating a
new contract with them, she discovered that they would not be put off so

Back to Work: The New Dependency

433

easily. This time they insisted upon being heard, and Frances Leigh had
little choice but to listen.

For six mortal hours I sat in the office without once leaving my chair,
while the people poured in and poured out, each one with long explana¬
tions, objections, and demonstrations. I saw that even those who came
fully intending to sign would have their say, so after interrupting one
m an and having him say gravely," Top, missus, don’t cut my discourse,”

I sat in a state of dogged patience and let everyone have his talk out,
reading the contract over and over again as each one asked for it, answer¬
ing their many questions and meeting their many objections as best I
could. One wanted this altered in the contract, and another that. One was
willing to work in the mill but not in the field. Several would not agree
to sign unless I promised to give them the whole of Saturday for a holiday.
Others ... would "work for me till they died,” but would put their hand
to no paper. And so it went on all day, each one "making me sensible,”
as he called it.

Through it all, she remained "immovable,” insisting that they agree to the
contract as it stood. On the first day, she managed to sign sixty-two of the
field hands—"good work,” she thought, "though I had a violent attack of
hysterics afterwards, from fatigue and excitement.” Only once did she lose
her composure and that was when a freedman, "after showing decided
signs of insolence,” finally declared, "Well, you sign my paper first, and
then Ill sign yours.” She ordered him off the plantation, only to have him
return minutes later "with a broad grin on his face” and prepared to sign
the contract. After several days of negotiation, she claimed to have broken
"the backbone of the opposition,” and all but two of the laborers went back
to work under the new contract; one left from " im agined ill-health” and
the other she dismissed for "insubordination.” 102

The economic necessity which forced planters to bargain with their
former slaves did not make the experience any less demeaning or exasper¬
ating. A Louisiana planter confided to his diary how he had "purposely”
stayed away from the sugar house "to avoid talking to the negroes about
a contract before I was ready to make one.” When he finally did so, he found
the final terms to be "distasteful” but unavoidable. "Every body else in the
neighborhood has agreed to pay the same and mine would listen to nothing
else.” The task of having to deal with their former slaves at the bargaining
table could be further aggravated by the obvious delight the laborers
derived from the proceedings and the breakdown in the traditional forms
of deference. When Daniel Heyward, the South Carolina planter, met with
his blacks, the word soon got around that they had been "kind enough but
spoke to him sitting, and with their hats on.” Not only did they seem
"confounded and incredulous as to his ownership of the land” but they
shook their heads when he suggested they work in much the same way as
they had before emancipation. "Oh no, neva work as they did,” they re¬
plied, "and no overseer and no drivers.” Upon hearing this story, an ac¬
quaintance of the Heyward family expressed no surprise: "Now all this

434

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

strikes me as being exactly what was to be expected. That feeling of secu¬
rity and independence has to be eradicated; and if it should survive after
January [1866], I think with proper management it will be effectually
extirpated before we wish to put seed in the ground in March or April.” 103

Employers evinced the most resistance to precisely those demands—
less supervision, more free time, and the opportunity to lease lands—that
might ultimately lead to a greater measure of independence and self-reli¬
ance for their black workers. To the freedmen, these issues naturally took
on added significance with each new contract year, reflecting their discour¬
agement over the most recent settlement, the failure of their land aspira¬
tions, and their precarious economic position. If planters grew to fear that
crop shares, as a substitute for cash wages, compromised the proper rela¬
tionship between themselves and the laborers, growing numbers of freed¬
men turned to that form of compensation as affording them an enhanced
feeling of independence. After charging that indebtedness now character¬
ized the monthly wage system, the black newspaper in South Carolina
advised agricultural laborers to work the land on shares or leases and
thereby "retrieve the mistakes of the past season.” About the same time,
late in 1865, on a cotton plantation near Beaufort, the freedmen countered
the planter’s wage offer by demanding half the crop instead. Upon being
turned down, they appealed to the local Union commander, who advised
them to agree to the employer’s fair offer. Still refusing to concede any¬
thing, the laborers crowded around the planter when he visited their quar¬
ters, shouting their demand for "half the crop.” With the planting season
about to begin and the freedmen refusing to sign the contract, Federal
troops were dispatched to remove the rebellious blacks from the plantation
and mak-p room for more compliant workers. The show of force and the
threat to displace them from their jobs broke the resistance effectively, and
the laborers reluctantly gave up their fight for a share of the crop. 104

The questions of greater independence, more free time, and less super¬
vision proved to be inseparable. After the first agricultural season, planters
and Freedmen’s Bureau agents noted the persistence with which blacks
refused to labor on Saturday for anyone but themselves, preferring to tend
their own garden plots or to sell in town some of the produce they had
raised. "Five days I’ll work,” a Mississippi field hand insisted, in refusing
to sign a new contract, "but I works for no man on Saturday.” If he worked
on Saturday, another freedman told his employer, he expected additional
compensation. On Johns Island, the issue even assumed religious propor¬
tions in May 1866 when an elderly black woman claimed a revelation from
heaven forbidding work on Fridays and Saturdays; many of the freedmen
hailed the revelation as "God’s truth” and ceased to work on those days
until Federal authorities threatened to intervene and drive the blacks off
the island. The way in which some planters and freedmen finally resolved
this demand was to compromise in favor of half a day’s work on Saturday
or to excuse one member of a family, usually the wife or oldest daughter,
on Saturday afternoon so that she could attend to domestic duties. The idea

Back to Work: The New Dependency

435

of a five-day workweek, like the share system, imparted to many freedmen
a greater feeling of independence even as their economic situation re¬
mained the same, and for some it reflected a growing assumption that they
were perfectly capable of managing agricultural operations without white
interference. On plantations where overseers had been retained, for exam¬
ple, the objections were directed not so much to the quality of the individual
hired to fill that position, which had once been the principal issue, but to
supervision by any white man. "Some of the best hands told me,” a Bureau
officer reported from Mississippi in 1866, " 'they would not have a superin¬
tendent to direct them as they knew how to do the work as well as any
white man.’ ” More than a year later, after investigating labor troubles on
several Louisiana plantations, a Bureau officer thought the freedmen were
"greatly to blame, as they would not, as a general rule, be dictated to either
by their employers or their agents; in fact, they will not have a white man
dictate to them.” 105

The refusal to sign a contract was the freedman’s principal bargaining
weapon and he could wield it but once a year. The longer he held out, the
later the planting season began, and many laborers obviously hoped to use
such leverage to exact the desired concessions. If the planter remained
unyielding, he would have to face the arduous and urgent task of hiring
new laborers, and in some instances the replacements would come onto
plantations littered with the charred remains of what had once been the
farm buildings. If the evicted blacks could no longer use the facilities,
nobody else would. Shortly after a planter in South Carolina ousted the
laborers for their refusal to work, the house in which he and his sons were
living suddenly erupted into flames; several nights later, he bent down to
pick something up "just in time to escape a whistling bullet.” On still other
plantations, after being ordered to leave for refusal to sign contracts, black
laborers burned down the employer’s house and entrenched themselves in
their quarters. Little wonder that a planter should have advised his col¬
leagues to use "forbearance and management” in dealing with their labor¬
ers, for "a recourse to other means may cause the buildings to be laid in
ashes, as was the case in my late brother’s place near Mobile, Alabama.” 106

On the plantations in Louisiana he managed for the absentee owner,
Wilmer Shields experienced that now characteristic period of indecision
and maneuvering before obtaining any success with the laborers. The al¬
most always exhausting process of negotiating a contract would begin in
the early fall and continue into the next year. In mid-September 1866, for
example, Shields already despaired of retaining most of the laborers
beyond the present crops. Not only did he find the blacks "very fond of
change” but "a// of our neighbors want them, and some are offering every
inducement they can to get them away—promising teams and horses to
take them to town every Saturday.” By November, only a few laborers had
indicated they intended to remain, "most of these worth but little—being
either old or sickly.” The others had begun to make clear the new condi-

436

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

tions they would insist upon—a five-day workweek, the use of horses and
teams for occasional trips to Natchez, more pay, a school, "and many other
things.” IfShields refused to budge on these demands, the freedmen threat¬
ened to take their labor elsewhere, and he knew only too well how willing
his neighbors were to oblige.

Metcalfe I hear is making efforts to get a very large force, offering induce¬
ment, with plenty of whiskey and every latitude & liberty to do as they
please if they work for him. And Hutchins tampers with our Negroes and
those who left us ..., offering to furnish mules, utensils and all planta¬
tion gear & tools for h al f the cotton made. I mention only two.

In mid-December, a laborer told Shields he thought "the whole of Satur¬
day and a school would keep nearly all.” The manager had no objection to
a school but he strongly advised his employer against any concessions to
a five-day workweek; meanwhile, he prepared to stop issuing any food
rations to laborers who refused to sign after the old contract expired. On
January 1, the moment of decision neared. "The cry with our people now
is, that we are too strict and do not pay enough.” Several of the neighboring
planters, in the meantime, had made offers that proved to be irresistible.
"He has nothing whatever to do with his place,” Shields said of one nearby
planter. "Not a word to say—The Negroes manage all and are to give him
one half.” When the expected "stampede” came to his plantations, Shields
was thus not altogether surprised. But a sufficient number remained,
largely because they wished "to be at home” and they doubted the honesty
of the neighboring planters. The final settlement closely resembled the
original proposal, with the hands choosing between cash wages (double the
previous year’s rates) and an interest in the crop; the employer did concede
the establishment of a school, though the freedmen were to pay for the
teacher and his tenure would rest on his "good behaviour.” To replace the
losses, Shields tried to hire other laborers but with little success. "They
demand exorbitant wages—And the more the white owner of the soil
yields, the more they require.” 107

Where a considerable demand for black labor prevailed, planters
found it difficult to sustain a united front against potentially ruinous com¬
petition. Vying with each other for scarce field hands, very much as
Shields’s neighbors had, employers sometimes assumed the most solicitous
airs to induce blacks to contract with them. No doubt to incur favor with
his freedmen, John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, found himself driving
a wagonload of them to a nearby community, where they could attend a
"Negro barbecue” and dance through the night. Adele Allston tried to
satisfy her laborers by stocking the plantation with "some extras, such as
beef etc., while another South Carolina planter modified his original
terms by giving a freedman "more time to work for himself.” The Reverend
Samuel Agnew thought his father "had no alternative” but to accede to the
extravagant demands of a valued laborer, although he thought he had

Back to Work: The New Dependency

437

reached an agreement with the man for a lesser sum the previous week.
"But he [the laborer] could get more and he took advantage of circum-
stances.” Hard-pressed for laborers, a Mississippi planter ventured to New
Orleans and offered a black labor agent five dollars a head for all the men
he could obtain; the agent prepared to accommodate the planter but upon
learning where the freedmen were to be sent he refused any further assist¬
ance, saying he would not send a black man to Mississippi for a hundred
dollars a head. "And why?” the outraged planter bellowed afterwards. "All
because the sassy scoundrel said he didn’t like our Mississippi laws.” 108

Where employers had gained a reputation for abusing their laborers,
whether with the whip or the pen, they might lose all of them at the end
of the season and find it exceedingly difficult to attract any replacements.
"The Negroes have a kind of telegraph by which they know all about the
treatment of the Negroes on the plantations for a great distance around,”
a Florida planter observed. And they obviously availed themselves of such
knowledge before they contracted with anyone, the local Bureau agent
added, after finding some planters unable to secure a single laborer. If the
freedmen decided to remain with such an employer or hire out to him, they
were apt to do so only after driving a hard bargain. In the Ogeechee district
of Georgia, a planter with a notorious reputation among the local blacks
had to offer one half the crop rather than the customary one third; at the
same time, he agreed to divide his land into plots and permit the blacks to
work them as they chose without any white supervisors. That seemed
eminently fair to one local freedman; after all, he remarked, "when a man
has been burned in the fire once you cannot make him run in again.” 109

Although slavery had never precluded a certain amount of bargaining,
culminating at times in verbal understandings about work routines and
the limits of authority, the first years of emancipation created new possi¬
bilities and a host of novel experiences in labor relations. When former
slaves and former slaveholders confronted each other as employees and
employers, conflicts were bound to arise and in numerous instances the
deadlocks which resulted clearly resembled strikes and lockouts. After
investigating disturbances on plantations in Coahoma County, Mississippi,
a Freedmen’s Bureau officer came away deeply impressed with the sense
of unity manifested by the black laborers. "I find that when one or more
Freedman becomes dissatisfied others are very liable to sympathize with
him, and in case one leaves, others will follow.” That same inclination to
vent their grievances and press their demands collectively rather than as
individuals pervaded low-country South Carolina, where the freedmen
finally gave up the expectation of land only to demand control of the crops.
"It is really wonderful how unanimous they are,” a sympathetic Bureau

438

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

agent reported; "'communicating like magic, and now holding out, knowing
the importance of every day in regard to the welfare of the next crop;—
thinking that the planters will be obliged to come to their terms.” 110

Apart from the obvious advantages of collective action at contract
time, the same unity would be maintained during the year to protect
laborers from physical abuse and to support them in any reinterpretation
of the contract they deemed essential to their welfare. On a Mississippi
plantation, the employer managed somehow to write into the contract a
stipulation that if the freedmen failed to work satisfactorily, she reserved
the right to hire additional laborers at their expense. But when she invoked
the clause, the freedmen threatened to drive the new men off the planta¬
tion and eventually won a favorable decision from the local Bureau agent.
Nor could a planter, as in the old days, single out a freedman for punish¬
ment and gather the other hands around to witness the proceedings as a
lesson to all of them. When a Mississippi proprietor (a former Union officer)
attempted to tie a freedman up by the thumbs for his impudence and
refusal to work, nearly every laborer quit work and several of them went
to an adjoining plantation to mobilize assistance; the planter soon faced a
formidable group armed with rifles "and other war-like weapons” and
immediately called upon the Bureau to rush him some support. 111 With
similar displays of unity and various degrees of success, freedmen protested
delays in paying them for their work, forcibly resisted attempts by Union
soldiers to search their cabins for furniture allegedly belonging to their
employer, and refused to work on the public roads (charging that most
whites were exempted from such labor). 112

When "a very large assemblage” of blacks convened in a South
Carolina community in late 1866, the speakers dwelled on the inadequacy
of one third of the crop as compensation for the labor they had performed
the previous year. The only conditions under which they should now con¬
tract, they agreed, would be for an equal division of the crops among those
who labored and those who owned the land. To a local white who observed
the proceedings, the meeting assumed "the character of a strike for higher
wages” but he found no cause for alarm and applauded the speakers for
their advice to act calmly, prudently, and in conformity with the law.
Whether or not such meetings were specifically intended to counter similar
"combinations” among white employers, black laborers in various parts of
the South thought they could strengthen their bargaining position by
agreeing on a common set of demands, including the minimum amount of
compensation for which they were willing to work. Significantly, they
understood the need to involve all the plantations in the region and even
to agree on penalties that would be meted out to those blacks who broke
their solid front. In Cherokee County, Alabama, the blacks pledged them¬
selves not to work for less than $2.00 a day during the harvest and assessed
a penalty of fifty lashes for any among them who agreed to work for less.
(White laborers subsequently gathered the harvest at $1.50 a day.) In
Rowan County, North Carolina, the freedmen simply resolved that anyone

439

Back to Work: The New Dependency

who worked for less than a certain sum would "have to abide the conse¬
quences. 113 Although such examples (unique even for white workers)
might well have been exceptional, they suggested a potential that could
have had a profound impact on labor and race relations. At least, the
prospects were sufficiently alarming to prompt many whites to concoct new
notions of conspiracy and revolution.

Aside from the freedmen’s work habits, nothing concerned planters
and Federal authorities more in 1866 and 1867 than the widely reported
proliferation of organizations among plantation laborers. Since most of
them were not easily identifiable, they seemed all the more menacing.
Near the end of 1866, alarming reports reached the Charleston office of the
Freedmen’s Bureau that freedmen in the Kingstree region were organized
into six armed military companies which drilled and marched "under Red
flags,” threatened white families, and intimidated blacks who refused to
join them. Upon investigating these sensational rumors, the Bureau officer
found that the freedmen in this region did, indeed, meet regularly to agree
on minimal demands for the next year of labor; the sole threat they had
issued was to migrate to Florida if they could not obtain "reasonable and
just” terms. If any of them possessed arms, the agent reported, they did so
with no violent intent but from "the foolish habit into which they have
fallen of carrying guns wherever they travel.” Still, the Bureau agent
thought it advisable to station a detachment of Union troops in the area
for "the moral effect” it might have on both white and black residents. 114

Any kind of organization among plantation hands, whether intended
for protective, benevolent, or economic purposes, was bound to create con¬
sternation in the white populace and revive old specters. The conclusion of
Bureau officers that most of the organizations rumored to be military in
nature were actually designed to exact economic concessions hardly al¬
layed white fears. The ostensible purpose of meetings of black laborers may
be "a strike for higher wages,” a white resident of Halifax County, North
Carolina, warned the governor, "but I believe the real design is to organize
for a General massacre of the White population. Nearly every negro is
armed not only with a Gun, but a revolver.... I am not one to get up an
alarm for a trifle, or to raise a noise because some one else does, but the
meeting of a thousand or two of negroes every other Sunday, with Officers
and Drilling, I think a serious matter.... I hope you will not use my name
in connection with this matter, as it may cost me my life.” 115

The fears provoked by organized action among black laborers proved
to be more than illusory. Since the early days of emancipation, whites and
Federal authorities alike had considerable difficulty distinguishing be¬
tween black work stoppages and insurrections. The confusion was at times
perfectly understandable. When a South Carolina planter heard that
blacks on a nearby plantation were "organized after military fashion” and
had posted guards on the roads leading to the place, he could hardly be
blamed for thinking in terms of an insurrection rather than a strike. The
events that transpired on a plantation near Georgetown could also easily

440

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

evoke the old fears. On March 31,1866, a freedman named Abram left the
field on which he had been working and called the other laborers out with
him; after arming themselves with axes, hatchets, hoes, and poles, they
drove the black agent of the proprietor off the premises. Finally, two Union
soldiers were called in to help quell the uprising, and the planter and his
agent prepared to restore order. "As soon as we entered the street the
people collected with axes, hoes, sticks and bricks and pelted us with bricks
and stones and poles, and took the gun away from one of the soldiers.” The
reports of blacks taking possession of plantations were not uncommon in
the postwar years, but the purpose of their action was not always clear. In
a number of instances, at least, the blacks did not actually lay claim to the
land but challenged the proprietor’s right to dictate to them and to dispose
of the crops they had raised. 116

The plantation "strike,” not always easy to define, could be a complex
affair, testing the ability of the workers to maintain a solid front against
the planter’s threat to evict them and the probability of Federal interven¬
tion. On a Louisiana plantation, when the hands struck for the immediate
payment of their wages and the right of each of them to have an acre of
land for his exclusive cultivation, the proprietor retaliated by refusing to
meet with them, calling in the Freedmen’s Bureau, and locking up the
mules—that is, turning a "strike” into a "lockout” and preventing the
workers from returning to their tasks without his permission. The Bureau
agent resolved the crisis, largely by rebuking the strike leader for his
insolent language and threatening to arrest him for breach of contract; at
the same time, he sought to exploit differences among the blacks about the
advisability of their action. "Dey didn’t want to quit,” several of them
indicated, "but dere was no use in deir wnckin’ by demselves, cause de rest
’d say dey was a turnin’ gin deir own color an’ a sidin’ wid de wite folks.”
To a northern visitor, who had witnessed the strike, the Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau had once again proven its worth. "I knew that but for this very agent
not less than a dozen heavy planters would have been compelled to suspend
operations. All availed themselves of his services.” 117

Along with evidence of collective action, the plantations would also
yield leaders capable of mobilizing black laborers. Although some drivers
and preachers retained the influence they had exercised before the war, the
continuity in leadership is difficult to determine. On the Sea Islands, a
Bureau officer investigating labor troubles placed the blame on "oracles”
among the freedmen, "and as they go, so go the whole without stopping to
consider.” Not uncommonly, a Bureau officer would determine that a par¬
ticular individual on the plantation had provoked the others to action and
he would dismiss him from the place. On the "old Combahee” plantation,
near Beaufort, South Carolina, a planter complained of "insolent” labor¬
ers who appeared to follow in the steps of Bob Jenkins, a black "firebrand”
he had previously ordered offhis place. Two Bureau agents investigated the
dispute, one of them J. J. Wright, a black man who would subsequently
play an important role in the Radical state government. In his report,

Back to Work: The New Dependency

441

Wright cited the testimony of the foreman, who claimed that the planter
had tried to speed up the work and Jenkins “knew a great deal and that
was the reason he was called a firebrand.” Several weeks later, a white
Bureau agent visited the same place, ordered the people to return to work,
and quickly disposed of Jenkins. "This ma n ’s influence was so evidently
bad that I ordered him to leave the place.” 118

Of growing concern, too, were black agitators who belonged to no
plantation but who allegedly aroused the freedmen. Aaron Bradley, who
had migrated from Massachusetts to Georgia, remained a controversial
figure throughout Reconstruction; as early as 1866, he elicited strong reac¬
tions from Bureau officers:

A man named Bradley has been making speeches at S[avannah] to the
colored people criticising President’s policy, advising Negroes not to
rnalrA contracts except at point of bayonet, and to disobey your orders;
have arrested him, he does not deny charges, proof conclusive. Genl
Steedmen has ordered him to be tried by Military Commission.

Two years later, after Bradley encouraged blacks to take possessory title
of certain lands, Bureau officers a g a in cited his "pernicious influence over
the more ignorant of the freed people” and asked for authority to banish

him from the region. 119 .

The organized efforts of black laborers to improve working conditions
were not limited to the plantations. Again, the number of successes
achieved may have been less important than the possibilities revealed by
such efforts. The "new phenomenon” of black stevedores in Charleston
refiising to work for less than two dollars a day was sufficiently spectacular
to be noted in the leading northern working-class newspaper, as was the
decision of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Memphis to break a strike of levee
workers before it erupted into a full-scale riot. In 1866 and 1867, strikes
also broke out among city laborers in Nashville, tobacco workers in Rich-
mond, lumberyard workers in Washington, D.C., and stevedores in New
Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah. The Savannah strike elicited particu¬
lar attention, if only because white and black stevedores combined to resist
a new tax imposed on their occupation; the police intervened but confined
its arrests and beatings to the black workers. 120 In New Orleans, black
stevedores bad to be restrained from lynching a contractor who had al¬
legedly defrauded them of their wages; the police rescued the contractor,
while a detachment of troops dispersed the more than five hundred steve¬
dores who had assembled to express their grievances. In late 1865, even as
many whites feared an imm inent black uprising. New Orleans looked upon
the rare sight of black and white stevedores joining forces to strike for
higher wages. The mayor himself conceded the impressive quality of such
an event, particularly the demonstration of racial unity among the work¬
ers. "They marched up the levee in a long procession, white and black
together. I gave orders that they should not be interfered with as long as

442

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

they interfered with nobody else; but when they undertook by force to
prevent other laborers from working, the police promptly put a stop to
their proceedings.” 121

Whatever the promise of such combined efforts, neither white trade
unions nor the black press would permit them to herald a new era in urban
labor relations. When it came down to admitting blacks into the few exist¬
ing trade unions, the racial barriers were impregnable. "At present, we
have nothing to do with the negro,” a white carpenter in Richmond de¬
clared at a meeting of his union, "but the time is coming, and we must
prepare ourselves to say to this dark sea of misery, 'thus far shalt thou
come, but no farther.’ ” Noting that sentiment, a Richmond black predicted
"an irrepressible conflict between the white and the black mechanics of the
South,” now that the whites had been contaminated by the same "devilish
prejudice” that ostracized black mechanics in the North. In New Orleans,
meanwhile, the Tribune, voice of the free colored community, adopted a
stance during the stevedores’ strike that anticipated the generally hostile
attitude of black middle-class leadership toward trade unions and strikes.
"Poor negroes,” it said of blacks beaten for continuing to work, "abused
when suspected of being unwilling to work, and mauled when ready to
labor!” When stevedores took to the streets to mobilize support for then-
strike, the newspaper lamented the number of blacks among them, noting
how "their white fellow-workers despise them under ordinary circum¬
stances.” After the laborers returned to their jobs at the old wages, the
newspaper could only conclude, "Such is generally the folly of strikes.” 122

Whether on the plantations or in the cities, black workers confronted
obstacles not unfamiliar to white laborers in the North. Since any work
stoppage during the agricultural season necessarily required a breach of
contract, field hands found themselves in an even more precarious position.
The decision to cease work could not be made easily, involving as it did the
possibility of eviction with a loss of accrued wages and the probability of
Federal intervention. Not long after a Union commander announced his
intention to remove all laborers who failed to conclude agreements with
their employers, a group of freedmen near Savannah refused to renew a
contract they thought to be unfair. But neither were they willing to move,
even when a Bureau agent and five soldiers ordered them to do so. The
agent returned with fifty soldiers, the blacks "crowded together in solid
phalanx and swore more furiously than before that they would die where
they stood, each side leveled guns at the other, and the soldiers withdrew.
But the point had been made, and blacks knew full well they could not
stand for long against an entire army. 123

If judged by certain isolated examples, the possibilities might have
seemed truly promising, perhaps even momentous. The planters owned the
land, while the freedmen commanded the labor, and each side reserved
the right to use that power to exact concessions from the other, with the
differences finally resolved through negotiations. That state of affairs en¬
couraged the black newspaper in South Carolina to think that a new day

Back to Work: The New Dependency

443

had dawned. 'It takes two to make a bargain now-a-days,” the editor
exulted after noting that the former slaves no longer had to contract with
their former owner simply because he desired it. But the new era envi¬
sioned by this newspaper died in infancy. Appreciating where the power
still resided, the employer could hold out against the "extravagant de¬
mands of his laborers, thinking that by January they would be forced to
work at whatever terms he dictated. More often than not, that turned out
to be a correct assumption. "They thought, by standing out, they could
force me to terms about their mules and cotton/’ the agent of a Louisiana
planter remarked. "But I soon undeceived them. I rigged up the carts,
packed their traps into them, and sent them bag and baggage off the
place.... Now they’re sneaking back every day and asking leave to enter
into contract.” 124

Despite the triumphs scored by the field hand on some plantations,
particularly in regions where a scarcity of labor prevailed, the bargaining
power he wielded with his right to reject a contract proved far less formida¬
ble in practice than in theory. "What kin we do, sah?” an underpaid laborer
in Virginia asked; "dey kin give us jes what dey choose. Man couldn’t
starve, nohow; got no place to go; we ’bleege to take what dey give us. In
the North, white workers came to learn comparable lessons about that
much-cherished right to bargai n with an employer—that is, they could
work at whatever wages and under whatever conditions their hungriest
competitors were willing to accept or not work at all. In the postwar South,
the options seemed even more limited. If the laborer chose to hold out for
better terms, he could be evicted, with the planter free to call on Federal
authorities for assistance. If the laborer voluntarily left the plantation,
dissatisfied with the previous year’s meager earnings and disinclined to
contract for still another year of the same, how would he support himself?
To whom could he turn? Although the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized his
right to contract elsewhere, it insisted that he contract with some em¬
ployer; if not, he could be arrested for vagrancy, incarcerated for a brief
time, forced to work on the public streets, and finally hired out to an
employer under a contract arbitrarily prepared by the Bureau officer. If he
chose to work elsewhere, he also faced in some regions the possibility of
being blacklisted by other planters, particularly if he had a previous record
as a malcontent or rebel. Dissatisfied with conditions, a laborer in Guilford
County, North Carolina, left his place of employment and settled a few
miles down the road. "I gathered up some o’ our boys,” his former employer
declared, "and we went down to this place whar I thought he was at, and
told him he’d make tracks before night, and if he was found in this neigh¬
borhood arter next day we’d shoot him wharever we found him.... We ant
agoin’ to let niggers walk over us.” Finally, if laborers combined among
themselves to resist a contract they considered unacceptable, they faced
the likelihood of intervention by local militia units or Federal troops. 125

Having found no alternative that could sustain them, the vast majority
of blacks returned each year to their familiar labors under a contractual

444

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

arrangement. But it often proved to be a precarious truce rather than a
planters’ jubilee. Although blacks found their bargaining power sharply
circumscribed, that did not guarantee the quality of their subsequent labor
or an orderly plantation. The opprobrium heaped upon black labor in 1865
would be repeated with even greater regularity and the usual expressions
of dismay in subsequent years—disregard for contracts, erratic work, arro¬
gant behavior, insolent language, and a contempt for any kind of authority.
Few planters considered themselves more exemplary in their behavior and
attitudes than Everard Green Baker of Panola, Mississippi. As a slave¬
holder, he claimed to have made every effort to keep his blacks "joyous and
happy,” and the wartime experience no doubt solidified his self-image.
While the slaves of neighboring planters fled, his blacks showed "their good
sense & stood true to mine & their interests.” After emancipation, they
remained with him, and in January 1866 he noted how "cheerfully” they
went to work—"perhaps better than any others in the neighborhood.” Six
months later, however, for reasons Baker found inexplicable, his freedmen
worked only "tolerably,” failing to report early in the morning and remain¬
ing in their cabins for two or three hours at noon. "I do not think I will be
bothered any more with freedmen,” the discouraged planter confided to his
diary. One year later, he added a footnote to that entry: "I had better have
adhered to the above resolution. I did not & much regret it.” 126

Even if they successfully contracted with their work force, some plant¬
ers found little relief in the day-to-day ordeal of supervising free black
laborers, many of whom refused to surrender their newly acquired preroga¬
tives or accommodate themselves to a contract they had been compelled to
sign. On the plantations in South Carolina she had managed since the
death of her husband in 1864, Adele Allston had endured work stoppages
and near rebellions. With each new crisis her confidence ebbed still further
until finally her patience ran out. "Negroes will soon be placed upon an
exact equality with ourselves,” she wrote in late 1866, "and it is in vain for
us to strive against it.” In 1869, after most of her properties had been sold
at auction, she retired to Chicora Wood, her sole possession, and planted
a few acres of rice. With similar resignation, Ethelred Philips, the Florida
physician and farmer, replaced his "worthless” black servants with "a poor
ignorant white girl” and contemplated removing himself and his family to
California, where they might be free of "the everlasting negro” rather than
have to wait out his inevitable extinction. "They have the China man in
place of the African and do what they please with him and no one cares
about it—he does not happen to be fashionable color.” 127

Few gave up the struggle with greater reluctance and internal torment
than Mary Jones, the deeply religious owner of three plantations in Liberty
County, Georgia. After the death of her husband in 1863, she had resolved
to carry on the family tradition of paternal affection and beneficent regard
for the black children of God. If only they had not also been her laborers,
acting all too often as adult men and women, the rewards might have been
greater. The plantations languished, the freedmen manifested their discon-

Back to Work: The New Dependency

445

tent with the conditions of labor, and an incident early in 1866 proved to
be a turning point. Shortly after two blacks—July and Jesse—asked to see
a copy of the contract, the black foreman reported to his employer that the
laborers "one and all” refused to work; they were dissatisfied with the
contract and thought she intended to deceive them. Along with July and
Jesse (whom she suspected as the "ringleaders”), Mary Jones proceeded to
the nearest office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, where the local agent advised
them that the contract was perfectly legal, even if other planters in the
area had offered a greater share of the crop to their laborers. That ended
the affair and the freedmen returned to work, but for Mary Jones it had
obviously been a demeaning experience.

I have told the people that in doubting my word they offered me the
greatest insult I ever received in my life; that I had considered them
friends and treated them as such, giving them gallons of clabber every
day and syrup once a week, with rice and extra dinners; but that now
they were only laborers under contract, and only the law would rule
between us, and I would require every one of them to come up to the mark
in their duty on the plantation. The effect has been decided, and I am not
sorry for the position we hold mutually. They have relieved me of the
constant desire and effort to do something to promote their comfort.

The relief this may have afforded Mary Jones failed to instill in her work¬
ers any greater appreciation for the conditions under which they labored.
Several months after the incident, Charles C. Jones, Jr., advised his mother
to avoid still another skirmish with the "ingrates” and sell the plantations.
Problems would persist everywhere in the South, he warned, as long as
whites allowed themselves to be "led by the Negroes” rather than direct
and control their labor.

But Mary Jones held on, sustained by her faith in "His infinite wisdom
and special guidance,” even as she lost all faith in the ability of her former
slaves to become intelligent and reliable free workers.

The whole constitution of the race is adverse to responsibility, to truth,
to industry. He can neglect duty and violate contracts without the least
compunction of conscience or loss of honor; and he can sink to the lowest
depths of want and misery without any sense of shame or feeling of
privation which would afflict a sensitive Caucasian.

After still more outbreaks of disaffection ("they dispute even the carrying
out and spreading the manure”), new fears ("they all bear arms of some
sort”), new losses ("Gilbert is very faithful, and so is Charles. They are the
exceptions”), she acceded to her son’s warning that they would all face
troublesome times "before the white race regains its suspended suprem¬
acy.” Early in 1868, Mary Jones gave up the plantations, which had now
become for her "the grave of my buried hopes and affections.” 128

Only a few years after the war, the sight of an old master gathering
around him his former slaves, all of whom still maintained that gamp
deference in his presence, filled a white observer in South Carolina with
nostalgic memories. He had seen more than enough, he conceded, to know
that such exhibitions of the old affections stood out "like an oasis in the
desert.” On the eve of Radical Reconstruction, most planters and freedmen
appeared to be dissatisfied in various degrees with the workings of the new
labor system. While planters fretted over erratic work habits, freedmen
complained of little inducement to work. Where it had only recently been
popular to contemplate the rapid demise of the African race under free¬
dom, the talk now turned increasingly to the demise of the plantation
system, if only because the blacks refused to work as slaves, rebelled
against white authority, and rejected any organization of labor that resem¬
bled the old times. "If a man got to go crost de riber, and he can’t git a boat,
he take a log,” a freedman on James Island, South Carolina, declared after
the planters had repossessed their lands. "If I can’t own de land. I’ll hire
or lease land, but I won’t contract.” 129

Even as the freedman returned to work for wages or shares, disillu¬
sionment with the meager rewards of his labor kept alive that persistent
"mania for owning a small piece of land” and farming for himself. That is,
he retained an aspiration he had seen many whites and even a few blacks
realize. With the end of each agricultural season, the aspiration seemed to
take on a new life. While trying to explain the unwillingness of blacks to
contract in early 1866, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in South Carolina ma d*
a revealing observation, perhaps without fully appreciating its implica¬
tions: "They appear to be willing to work, but are decisive in their expres¬
sions, to work for no one but themselves.” Only a week earlier, another
Bureau officer noted the unani m ity with which the laborers refused to
contract unless they could control the crops they made. After considering
the options open to them, the freedmen on Edisto Island, who were about
to lose the lands they had been cultivating, declared that nothing could
induce them to work again for their former masters under the old system.
But if they could rent the lands they now worked, they were willing to
remain. It was the only way to retain at least a semblance of the indepen¬
dence they were now being asked to surrender. 130

The experiences of planters in various sections of the South testified
to the determination of the freedman to "set up for himself.” After pay ing
wages for three years and treating his hands "with the utmost kindness,”
a planter in Maury County, Tennessee, seemed perplexed by their "grow-
ing dislike to being controlled by or working for white men. They prefer to
get a little patch where they can do as they choose.” Before his laborers
would agree to contract, a Louisiana planter reported, they insisted on

Back to Work: The New Dependency

447

having tracts of land set off for their exclusive use. No sooner had she paid
off her hands, Frances Leigh noted, than a number of them took their
money and purchased small, inadequate lots out in the pine woods, "where
the land was so poor they could not raise a peck of com to the acre.”
Although she thought they had been defrauded, she was still impressed by
the obvious enthusiasm with which her former laborers cleared the lots,
built their log cabins on it, and prepared to live "like gentlemen.” With
similar amazement, she had previously witnessed the remarkable transfor¬
mation that came over former slaves she thought "far too old and infirm
to work for me” when they came into possession of any land. "Once let
them get a bit of ground of their own given to them, and they became quite
young and strong again.” 131

The drift of these experiences, reflecting both old aspirations and re¬
cent disappointments, was unmistakable. Unable to acquire ownership of
land, whether because he lacked the funds or local custom barred him, the
black laborer increasingly resolved on am alternative that would provide
him with the feeling if not the actual status of a family farmer. He became
a sharecropper. In the usual arrangement, the planter divided his land into
small units or "farms” and rented them to individual black families; he also
furnished the necessary implements, work animals, and seed. In return,
the tenant or "farmer” paid the planter one half of the crops he raised; if
he supplied his own tools and animals, he generally paid one fourth to one
third of his crops. In either case, he might have to pledge another portion
of the prospective crops to the supply merchant (or the landowner serving
in that capacity) for the food and clothing he purchased. 132

After several years of highly precarious planting, the landowner was
n6t necessarily averse to the rental system, preferring to reorganize the
plantation rather than continue an increasingly unprofitable arrange¬
ment. At best, he hoped to achieve a modicum of economic success without
compromising his ownership of the land and without having to suffer the
ordeal of supervising black labor. Such a decision, nevertheless, was not
always reached easily. Only when he despaired altogether of operating the
place successfully along the old lines did the planter usually agree to divide
and rent. That was the only way he could procure labor "under any terms,”
an Alabama planter conceded, and still realize "a bare support” from his
land. Despite the anguish that often accompanied such decisions, however,
the plantation system itself remained very much intact. Only apportion¬
ment of land and responsibility on the plantation had been altered. 133

But to many freedmen, the new arrangement—tenant farming
seemed promising at first glance because of the feelings of independence
it imparted, making them in effect mock farmers and freeing them from
the cultivation of staple crops and from working in field gangs under
supervision. As if to underscore such feelings, the new tenant might move
his cabin from the old slave village out onto the plot of land he had rented
or else build a new cabin to symbolize his new autonomy. In opting for this
arrangement, moreover, he fully expected to make this plot of land his own

448

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

through hard work and frugality—precisely as his leaders and many of his
white friends from the North had advised him. But in most instances, such
aspirations remained unfulfilled and the tenant found himself little better
off than he had been under the previous arrangement. "We made crops on
shares for three years after freedom, and then we commenced to rent,”
Richard Crump recalled. "They didn’t pay everything they promised. They
taken a lot of it away from us. They said figures didn’t lie. You know how
that was. You dassent dispute a man’s word then.” 134

No matter how often the black press celebrated the few examples of
economic success and landownership, the great mass of laboring freedmen,
whether they rented lands or worked for wages or shares, remained labor¬
ers—landless agricultural workers. Even the illusion of independence im¬
parted by tenant farming could not obscure for very long the fact that the
black "farmer” enjoyed neither ownership of the soil nor the full rewards
of his labor. He worked the white man’s land, planted with the white man’s
seeds, plowed with the white man’s plow and mules, and harvested a crop
he owed largely to the white man for the land, the seeds, the plow, and the
mules, as well as the clothes he wore and the food he consumed. And if his
own leaders could offer him little more than the mid-nineteenth-century
shibboleths of hard work, perseverance, frugality, and honesty, to whom
could he turn? How could he be frugal if he had no money to save? Why
should he be honest only to have the white man defraud him? Why should
he work hard and persevere if the results of that labor left him even further
removed from acquiring the land on which he toiled? "The negro’s first
want is, not the ballot, but a chance to live,—yes, sir, a chance to live, ” a
prominent white Georgian declared in late 1865. "Why, he can’t even live
without the consent of the white man! He has no land; he can make no
crops except the white man gives him a chance. He hasn’t any timber; he
can’t get a stick of wood without leave from a white man. We crowd him
into the fewest possible employments, and then he can scarcely get work
anywhere but in the rice-fields and cotton plantations of a white man who
has owned him and given up slavery only at the point of the bayonet....
What sort of freedom is that?” 135

If the freedman’s "mania” for renting or owning land came to symbol¬
ize his yearning for economic independence and personal freedom, the
betrayal of those expectations confirmed the persistence of the old de¬
pendency. The former slave found that all too little had changed. By
resorting to a sharecropping arrangement, he had hoped to achieve a sig¬
nificant degree of autonomy; instead, he found himself plunged ever deeper
into dependency and debt, pledging his future crops to sustain himself
during the current crop. In that brief flurry of excitement and anticipation
at the moment of freedom, there had been all kinds of talk about land and
"living independently” and being able to do what the white folks did. But
the talk was now of survival, their principal hopes remained unfulfilled,
and some freedmen were certain they had been hopelessly betrayed. "We
thought we was goin’ to get rich like the white folks,” recalled Felix Hay-

Back to Work: The New Dependency

449

wood, who had been a slave in Texas. "We thought we was goin’ to be richer
than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work, and
the whites didn’t and they didn’t have us to work for them anymore. But
it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make
folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.” 136

More than seventy years after emancipation, Thomas Hall, who had
been bom a slave in Orange County, North Carolina, could still shake with
anger when he thought about the way his people had been freed. "Lincoln
got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He give us freedom without
giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the
southern white man for work, food and clothing, and he held us through
our necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery.
Lincoln done but little for the negro race and from living standpoint noth¬
ing.” While relating a history of white betrayal, North and South, the
bitterness overflowed and he finally turned it upon the white interviewer.

You are going around to get a story of slavery conditions and the
persecutions of negroes before the civil war and the economic conditions
mnrpm in g them since that war. You should have known before this late
day all about that. Are you going to help us? No! you are only helping
yourself. You say that my story may be put into a book, that you are from
the Federal Writers’ Project. Well, the negro will not get anything out
of it, no matter where you are from. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. I didn’t like her book and I hate her. No matter where you
are from I don’t want you to write my story cause the white folks have
been and are now and always will be a g a ins t the negro . 1

Chapter Nine

THE GOSPEL
AND THE PRIMER

Wealth , intelligence and godliness combined, make their possessors in¬
dispensable members of a community.

—ADDRESS OF THE BISHOPS OF THE AFRICAN
METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, MAY 2, 1866 1

Wat's de use ob niggers pretendin' to lurnin? Bey's men on dis yeah
plantation, old's I am, studyin' ober spellin'-book, an' makin' b'lieve's
ifdey could lam. Wat's de use? Wat'll dey be but niggers wen dey gits
through?Niggers good for nothin' but to wuck in de fvel' an' make cotton.
Can't make white folks ob you'selves, if you is free.

—BLACK DRIVER, FISH POND PLANTATION,

LOUISIANA, APRIL 1866 2

W hen the Civil War ended, Henry McNeal Turner sensed that his
work had only begun. He thought he knew how and where he could
best serve his people. Two years earlier, he had preached his farewell

sermon as pastor of Israel Bethel Church in Washington, D.C., and within
weeks he had returned to his native South as a chaplain assigned to the
1st Regiment, United States Colored Troops. While serving in that post, he
manifested a racial pride that would distinguish his thoughts and actions
for the remainder of his life. Never would he relent in the conviction that

the African race possessed the capacity for intellectual and material great¬
ness. "I claim for them,” he wrote in August 1865, "superior ability.” None
of the renowned orators, ministers, and statesmen he had heard in the

North, not even a Henry Ward Beecher or a Charles Sumner, compared in
his estimation with the simple eloquence he had once heard from the lips
of a black slave in South Carolina. Nor did he consider the celebrated work

of architects and mechanics in the North superior to the skills demon¬
strated by many slave artisans. While conceding that these were "excep¬
tional” blacks who had "mastered circumstances,” Turner liked to think
of them nevertheless as "extraordinary projections” who suggested the still
largely unrealized potential of his people.

The Gospel and the Primer

451

Even with emancipation, he realized, this vast potential would be
difficult to tap. No matter how often he celebrated the achievements of
individual blacks, he remained deeply troubled in 1865 by the condition of
the great mass of recently freed slaves, especially those outside of the urban
centers who had spent a lifetime laboring in the fields, sustained only by
the will to survive. Almost everywhere he traveled in the postwar South,
Turner found freedmen still embracing and cherishing the old slave habits,
exhibiting little of the racial pride he felt so intensely; some of them were
too "timid,” "doubtful,” and "fearful” to exercise their freedom, preferring
instead to defer to their old masters or to transfer their feelings of depend¬
ency to their new Yankee masters.

That old servile fear still twirls itself around the heart strings, and fills
with terror the entire soul at a white man’s frown. Just let him say stop,
and every fibre is palsied, and this will be the case till they all die. True,
some possessing a higher degree of bravery may be killed or most horribly
mutilated for their intrepidity, but should this be the case, the white
man’s foot-kissing party will be to blame for it. As long as negroes will
be negroes (as we are called) we may be negroes.

That so many of his brethren should behave in this way came as no surprise
to him. "Oh, how the foul curse of slavery has blighted the natural great¬
ness of my race!” he wrote in early 1865, while his regiment was camped
in North Carolina "It has not only depressed and horror-streaked the
should-be glowing countenance of thousands, but it has almost transformed
many into inhuman appearance.”

By the close of the war, the rapidly proliferating northern benevolent
societies were actively engaged in tending to the religious, educational, and
relief needs of the freedmen. Turner knew of their activities, and he wel¬
comed the diligence, commitment, and resources they brought to the freed-
man’s cause. But he perceived, too, that hundreds of thousands of newly
freed slaves remained beyond the reach of these societies. Enjoying only a
superficial freedom, they survived as best they could without money, land,
or homes; they had never seen the inside of a schoolhouse, they either
embraced primitive notions of Christian worship or attended a white man’s
church (where they heard their bondage sanctified), and they had little or
no appreciation of the responsibilities and liabilities they had incurred
with emancipation. "They want to know what to do with freedom,” Turner
observed. "It is not natural that a people who have been held as chattels
for two hundred years, should thoroughly comprehend the limits of free¬
dom’s empire: the scope is too large for minds so untutored to enter upon
at once.” If Turner understood better than most the magnitude of the
problem, that necessarily tempered his optimism and prepared him for a
long and demanding ordeal. "I do not expect a high state of things, in this
day at most; it will be impossible for the present generation to become
wonders of the world. Nothing more than a partial state of civilization and
moral attainment can be hoped for by the most sanguine.”

452

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

That was more than sufficient inducement, however, for Turner to
enlist his efforts in the critical work of redeeming the nearly four million
slaves from the moral and spiritual degradation which their condition had
forced upon them. Upon resigning his chaplaincy in 1865, he chose to
remain in the South to organize freedmen into the African Methodist
Episcopal Church and subsequently into the Republican Party. 3

The prospects for a reformation in the post-emanicipation South
seemed auspicious, even exhilarating. While the Union soldier completed
the liberation of the slaves from physical bondage, the teacher would free
them from mental indolence and the missionary would lead them out of the
"Synagogues ofSatan.” Both the teacher and the missionary would assume
the responsibility for instilling in their minds the personal habits, moral
values, and religious character deemed necessary to dignify and implement
their new legal status. Although a formidable undertaking, the recruits
were available and eager to begin their work—several thousand men and
women of both races, some of them attached to the Freedmen’s Bureau,
some the designated agents of a church or a freedmen’s aid society, and
some initially unaffiliated but ready to serve in any capacity. "I dont ask
position or money,” a chaplain in a black regiment wrote a Freedmen’s
Bureau officer. "But I ask a place where I can be most useful to my race.
My learning, my long experience as a teacher North, and my faithful
service as Chaplain, demand that I seek such a place among my race.” 4 For
many of the recruits, their previous involvement in the abolitionist move¬
ment made this southern pilgrimage a particularly satisfying and fulfilling
experience. No less gratified were those in the black contingent who were
now returning to the places from which they had escaped as slaves or from
which they had exiled themselves as free blacks.

The vision that bound them together was that of a redeemed South.
Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England, with their vision
of a "city on a hill,” this modern Gideon’s Band proposed to establish
beachheads of Christian piety and Yankee know-how in the moral wilder¬
ness of the defeated Confederacy, dispelling the darkness which two centu¬
ries of human slavery had cast over the region. Teachers and missionaries
alike, whatever their race or affiliation, could agree on the critical need to
provide the recently freed slaves with prerequisites of civilization and
citizenship, and these would be nothing less than the virtues esteemed by
mid-nineteenth-century Americans and taught in nearly every school and
from every pulpit—industry, frugality, honesty, sobriety, marital fidelity,
self-reliance, self-control, godliness, and love of country. "Hitherto their
masters have acted and done for them,” a black religious journal observed,
"but now that they are free they must be taught how to be free.” A white
missionary educator in South Carolina said as much when he defined what
had to be done for the freedmen—"to unlearn them and learn them from,
the vices, habits and associations of their former lives.” And if the white
evangels could talk in terms of supplying enough teachers "to make a

The Gospel and the Primer

453

New England of the whole South/’ a black bishop of the African Meth¬
odist Episcopal Church could anticipate that glorious day when "New
England ideas, sentiments, and principles will ultimately rule the entire
South.” 5

Whatever the optimism and confidence with which the missionaries
and teachers began their work, sectarian rivalries, racial tensions, person¬
ality clashes, and differences over tactics and roles would take their toll
within the ranks of this strong-willed group of individuals. Even the most
dedicated and best-intentioned of them experienced their moments of dis¬
couragement, not only in seeking to minimize native white opposition and
internal dissension but in bridging the cultural gulf which separated them
from the former slaves. To communicate with the freedmen could be in
itself a tiring and exasperating ordeal. "We are not as yet like skilled in
negro-talk, ” one missionary teacher wrote home soon after arriving in
Virginia. The wonder perhaps is not that so many problems surfaced or
that some evangels fell from grace but rather that so many of them held
on and persevered under the most formidable challenges, sustained by the
depth of their commitment alone. "Ours is truly a missionary work,” C. M.
Shackford reported from Mississippi, "in our isolation from society, in
teaching the ignorant, in deprivation of many comforts, and in being the
scorn and derision of the community. There is a glory, excellence, and
satisfaction in the work.” 6

The same sense of high purpose that found this white missionary
laboring among the freedmen in Okolona, Mississippi, also nourished Rich¬
ard H. Cain, a black minister who had transplanted his pastorship from
Brooklyn, New York, to South Carolina. "I have often thought of my kin¬
dred at home—of the happy associations left behind. While I have toiled
through the hot sun and over the dense sands of the South, hungry and
weary, I have met hundreds of my brethren far away from their homes,
awaiting my arrival, that they might hear the truths of the Gospel. I have
forgotten my own trials in the flush of joy which thrilled my heart as I
gazed on the vast sea of upturned eyes and radiant, expectant faces. I have
exclaimed, Truly, the harvest is ripe, but the laborers are few.’ ” 7

The newly freed slaves viewed with varying degrees of marvel, grati¬
tude, and suspicion this strange army of men and women who came into
their midst carrying Bibles and spelling books instead of rifles. They were
clearly not like the white folks they had known; some of them, in fact,
seemed almost incongruous in a southern setting, antiseptic in appearance,
and stiff and formal in their manners and conversation. The language they
spoke, and the way in which they formed their words, confirmed their alien
appearance and made it difficult at times to make any sense out of what
they were saying. "Dey didn’t talk like folks here and didn’t understan’ our
talk,” recalled Wayman Williams, who had been a slave in Mississippi and
Texas, and he suggested that both sides would need to develop some pa¬
tience and a degree of compassion before the barriers of communication
would break down.

454

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Dey didn’t know what us mean when us say "titty” for sister, and "bud-
der” for brother, and "nanny” for mammy. Jes’ for fun us call ourselves
big names to de teacher, some be named General Lee and some Stonewall
Jackson. We be one name one day and ’nother name next day. Until she
git to know us she couldn’t tell de difference, ’cause us all look alike to
her.

The learning process, as Williams also remembered, proved quite often to
be reciprocal. While the teacher tried to instill proper English and pronun¬
ciation into them, the pupils introduced her to southern ways and to the
mysteries of black magic and conjuration. "De teacher from de North don’t
know what to think of all dat. But our old missy, who live here all de time,
know all ’bout it. She lets us believe our magic and conjure, ’cause she
partly believe it, too.” 8

Nor were the black emissaries from the North necessarily any less
alien to the freedmen, though they might have recognized the type at least
from some of the free Negroes they had known. Previous experience with
black drivers, black overseers, and even free Negroes had a way of temper¬
ing the initial enthusiasm with which the freedmen welcomed the black
teachers and missionaries; at the same time, the old slave preachers and
exhorters would resist any attempt to supplant them in position and influ¬
ence with their people. The northern black might also share with his white
co-workers a similar difficulty in bridging the cultural gulf between himself
and his southern brethren. "I cannot worship intelligently with the colored
people,” Thomas W. Cardozo confessed, "and, consequently, am at a loss
every sabbath what to do.” The educated black minister from the North
who soon found himself castigating the crude, unruly, and heathen worship
of his fellow blacks was no different than the black teacher from the North
who found himself suddenly and unexpectedly wielding the whip to enforce
discipline in the classroom.

I know not why, but I felt as it were, driven to it the first day. I cannot
attempt to philosophize on the matter. I shall have a long talk with you
when I return. Suffice it to say, in part, it is accountable to my inexperi-
ence of the vices to which these children have been reared and hence of
their general characteristics. I suppose in governing children as well as
adults much of our success depends on our ability to read human nature.

During the past six years in the North, he went on to explain, he had been
engaged largely in "theoretical pursuits”; although this had made him
confident of his intellectual abilities, he thought the transition to "practi¬
cal life” had simply been too abrupt. But he remained determined to suc-
ceed, if only because he recognized the unique opportunity he had been
afforded. "Here I am at last in a Slave State. How strange are the workings
of Providence! Who would have thought three years ago that such mighty
and important changes would so soon take place?” 9

The Gospel and the Primer

455

No matter how they defined success, and this tended to vary, the
missionaries and teachers who descended upon the post-emancipation
South would express considerable gratification over the progress of their
efforts, even as the records they left behind also revealed moments of
frustration, doubt, and discouragement. For the freedmen, of course, the
opportunity to worship in their own churches and to be taught in their own
schoolhouses had to be one of the supreme manifestations of their new
status. Not surprisingly, though, any attempt to impose "civilizing influ¬
ences on a "backward” people is bound to produce its share of misunder¬
standings and tensions between the evangels and their wards, in part
because that was invariably how the evangels viewed the relationship.
Whether to appease the hostility of native whites or to placate the cultural
biases and psychic needs of their northern friends, the freedmen would be
forced to pay some price in violated sensitivities and prolonged dependen¬
cies. Regardless of whether they were treated with disdain, a benign toler¬
ance, or exaggerated praise and condescension, there would be the many
occasions on which a freedman or freedwoman might have easily identified
with the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who observed,
"When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or
figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except

Since early in the war, the black South had loomed as a fertile field for
missionary labor. None recognized this potential more readily than did the
black churchmen of the North. "The Rubicon is passable exulted the
Reverend James Lynch in September 1861, after noting how his African
Methodist Episcopal Church had been compelled for years to operate on the
northern side of the Potomac River. "With God for our guide, and his
promises for our specie currency, we will cross, and carry there the legacy
of the sainted Allen, our church government, and the word of God.” Al¬
though the black church acted initially with caution, pending a clarifica¬
tion of the war’s objectives, the Emancipation Proclamation and the
enlistment of blacks in the Union Army removed any lingering doubts.
Within several months of these developments, James Lynch was on his way
to South Carolina. "My own heart has been fired by our brethren here,”
he soon reported. "Ignorant though they be, on account of long years of
oppression, they exhibit a desire to hear and to learn, that I never imag¬
ined. Every word you say while preaching, they drink down and respond
to, with an earnestness that sets your heart all on fire, and you feel that
it is indeed God’s work to minister to them.” 11

Although other denominations were no less zealous in bringing the
freed slaves into their respective folds, the Methodists and the Baptists

456

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

enjoyed a clear advantage from the outset. If the Baptists offered greater
organizational flexibility and more easily accommodated native black
preachers, the Methodists provided, as the founder of the AME Church
once explained, "the plain simple gospel” which "the unlearned can under¬
stand, and the learned are sure to understand.” Both of these pietistic sects
also found it necessary to spend less time in conversion than in simply
providing the organizational structure that would accommodate the tens
of thousands of slaves already committed to their faiths. When the Rever¬
end Lynch, for example, sought to organize the 800 black residents of
Helenaville, into the AME Church, he would report that "they all readily
assented, with the exception of a few Baptists.” At the same time, he
continued, "I licensed two local preachers, and two exhorters who had been
previously verbally licensed; I never saw men appreciate anything so much
in my life.” 12

No matter what denominations they represented, the black missionar¬
ies found upon entering the South a ready confirmation of the marvelous
workings of the Divine Spirit. To look around them, to witness at first band
this "most terrible retribution” which God had inflicted on the white South
for the "cruel barbarities” of slavery, more than fulfilled the warnings they
had hurled against Babylon from their pulpits in the North. What more
dramatic proof of His presence and the triumph of His justice than to see
for themselves Pharaoh’s hosts engulfed and vanquished. After the Rever¬
end Richard H. Cain walked through the streets of Charleston and gazed
at the ruins that were once "the dwellings of the proud and defiant man-
stealers,” he could only conclude that this city had become "a monument
of God’s indignation and an evidence of His righteous judgments.” For the
slave, he added, a new era had dawned, the day of redemption was at hand,
and the prophet’s proclamation had come to be realized: "Arise, shine: for
thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon thee.” And those
who wished to oversee the fulfillment of this prophecy had only to "go
among this redeemed people; enter their humble homesteads; sit down
with them and listen to their stories of wrong and their songs of rejoicing;
[and] gain their confidence.” For the Reverend Cain, Charleston was the
place to establish his church for the freedmen. 13

Although some of the black missionaries had once resided in the South
as slaves or free Negroes, many of them were native Northerners who had
formed their impressions of slavery in the abolitionist movement. Upon
entering the South, then, they expected to find a people degraded and
scarred—physically and psychically—by a lifetime of bondage and in des¬
perate need of "regeneration and civilization.” No proclamation or legisla¬
tive act, they assumed, could get at the evils that had accumulated and
festered over many decades. "As a malignant cancer leaves its roots after
being apparently cured,” the Reverend James W. C. Pennington observed
from Jacksonville, Florida, "so Slavery has left its barbarisms which are
in danger of being mixt up with all that is now being done for the advance¬
ment of Christian civilization among the people.” The breakup of slavery,

The Gospel and the Primer

457

he believed, had uncovered "a fearful moral chaos” in the South, and only
education and "the Remedial power of the Gospel” could accomplish for
the African race in the United States what they had already achieved
for the Anglo-Saxon race. Repeatedly, clerics and teachers alike would
define the task before them as undoing the moral depravity, self-debase¬
ment, and dependency which slavery had fostered in its victims, and the
Reverend Cain, for one, thought no vestiges of bondage more resistant to
reform than these. "The people are emancipated but not free!” he wrote
from Charleston. "They are still slaves to their old ideas, as well as to then-
masters. The great masses have, by the old systems, been taught that they
were inferior to the whites in everything, and they believe it still.” 14

If instruction in the spelling book could be left to the teacher, the work
of moral reformation belonged properly to the clergyman, but in the post¬
emancipation South such distinctions in roles were seldom deemed neces¬
sary or even desirable and the teacher and the minister in some instances
were the same person. In any event, both the school and the church de¬
clared open war on the "rum-suckers, bar-room loafers, whiskey-dealers,
and card players among the men, and those women who dressed finely on
ill-gotten gain.” The best weapon by which to combat these evils was
instruction at every level in the virtues of temperance, marital fidelity,
chastity, and domestic economy. The larger and the more urgently this
task loomed, the more frequently went out the appeals for assistance—for
more individuals like themselves who would dedicate their lives to the
work of redemption. "The only thing I regret is, that there are not more
Baptist and Methodist ministers down here,” the Reverend Arthur Wad¬
dell wrote from Beaufort, South Carolina. "When I say this, I mean colored
ministers, and I do not mean the silk-gloved kind, and those who come
down here to buy farms, and to cheat these poor people out of their rights.
But I mean those who come down here to preach Christ in the way that St.
Paul commanded Timothy.” 15

But the work of moral reformation was considered too vast and too
critical to leave to "colored ministers” alone. The white benevolent soci¬
eties placed the highest priority on this kind of missionary labor. That was
why Marcia Colton, upon arriving in Virginia, found herself assigned not
to a classroom or to a church but to Craney Island, in Norfolk harbor,
where she assumed responsibility for reforming a group of black prosti¬
tutes. In a prison-like encampment, she would attempt to direct these
fallen women into "the paths of virtue” and toward "Christ the Fountain
that cleaneth from all Sin.”

The Military & Moral authorities think it is a Military necessity to have
a Magdalen Camp on Craney Island, a sort of out-door Prison Life where
they can send these Women who having just emerged from Slavery, are
beset by bad Men (& many of these are connected with the Federal
Army,) led astray from the paths of virtue. And the influence of those who
have thus fallen being contagious with others, it is decided to arrest &
send them [without a trial] to the Island.

458

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Although not relishing the assignment, Miss Colton accepted it "in the
name and for the sake of Christ.” Her task was made no easier by the
conduct of the soldiers guarding the encampment, some of whom effected
sexual liaisons with the black women. "Alas—alas!” reported Miss Colton,
"that Sin,—the Sin of Sodom is so common in our Army. It’s a Sore trial
to Me that I do not have any Christian on the Island amongst the Guard
and no one even comes near Me to offer Me any support.” Moreover, she
complained, the officers in charge of the camp viewed the problem "with
Man’s judgment,” while "I from a Christian & moral standpoint, with
Woman’s Pity for the degraded and fallen of our own sex.” Whatever
methods she adopted to enlighten the women in the ways of virtuous living,
the results were less than gratifying. Upon serving out their "sentences,”
the women often returned to their "old haunts” in Norfolk, where they
would soon be arrested again and returned to the island. "There are so
many temptations in Norfolk, and they have so little moral power that it’s
hardly possible for them to resist.... I am not able to spend much time in
instructing them. They are not disposed to listen much to instruction.”
Despairing over her ineffectuality, Miss Colton suggested that the source
of the problem might lie in the African heathenism to which these "poor
degraded freedwomen” clung. "I am aware when I say this that you will
repel the Idea from your Mind as quickly as possible,” she wrote to her
supervisor. "Yet nevertheless I think it True. How else can I get any excuse
for this predominance of Animal habits which show themselves all the
while with most of them?” 16

Not the least of the "barbarisms” associated with slavery that dis¬
mayed both white and black missionaries was, in fact, the excessive emo¬
tionalism, frenzy, and "heathenism” they claimed to find in the religious
practices of the freedmen. Upon visiting a service on Roanoke Island,
Henry M. Turner thought the black parishioners worshipped "under a
lower class of ideas” and entertained crude conceptions of God. "Hell fire,
brimstone, damnation, black smoke, hot lead, &c., appeared to be presented
by the speaker as man’s highest incentive to serve God, while the milder
and yet more powerful message of Jesus was thoughtlessly passed by.” No
revival was considered complete, Turner observed on another occasion,
without some blacks indulging in the most ludicrous capers. "Let a person
get a little animated, fall down and roll over awhile, kick a few shins, crawl
under a dozen benches, spring upon his feet, ... then squeal and kiss (or
buss) around for awhile, and the work is all done.” If they had acted with
less zeal, Turner surmised, the legitimacy of their conversion might have
been questioned. It was this kind of "ignorant” and frenzied worship that
led Thomas W. Cardozo to avoid the freedmen’s church in Charleston and
that prompted an educated black woman to remark, "I won’t go to the
colored churches, for I’m only disgusted with bad grammar and worse
pronunciation, and their horrible absurdities.” 17

Neither the Methodists nor the Baptists were strangers to emotional
fervor in worship; indeed, that had been a source of their appeal to the

The Gospel and the Primer

459

slaves. What many of the missionaries now appeared to suggest, however,
was that emancipation demanded a new dignity and decorum in religious
worship, and that these objectives could best be attained through instruc¬
tion by an educated clergy. The Christian Recorder, as the official spokes¬
man for the AME Church, deemed this point particularly critical as it
described the activities of the church’s missionaries in the South.

There was a time when white ministers thought any kind of preaching
would do for colored people, and they would deal in small talk. There was
a time when colored ministers could glory in their own ignorance before
a congregation, and succeed in making the people believe they were
Divinely inspired, and secure their respect and homage. There was a time
when clownishness and incorrect speech were admired, and a swollen
pomposity and conceit were mistaken for ability.

Such primitive conceptions of worship, the newspaper suggested, would
now have to be discarded, along with the other relics of bondage. By expos¬
ing the freedmen to higher standards of worship, a white cleric hopefully
declared, they would learn the meaning of order and restraint—prerequi¬
sites of freedom whose importance went beyond the realm of religion.
"'Order in one kind of gathering will tend to the same in other things. They
are ignorant & unaccustomed to plan & manage for themselves and I
cannot help feeling strongly that their greatest need is orderly Churches,
under the care of educated men. For the effects of such religious order is
not easily overestimated, as it regards both spiritual things and tempo¬
ral.” 18

Until such order prevailed in the freedmen’s worship, both black and
white northern missionaries would share some common concerns. Upon
visiting their first black prayer meeting in the South, white ministers
conceded a certain admiration for the "simple and childlike” faith of the
freedmen, their evident "sincerity and earnestness,” their "implicit belief
in Providence,” their demonstrated love of prayer, and the powerful emo¬
tional impact of their music and hymns. "It took me nearer to heaven than
I had been for years,” one missionary said of the singing he had heard. Still
another spectator at a black religious service came away impressed not
only by the "purity and simplicity” of the slaves’ faith but also by its
practicality. "They believe simply in the love of Christ, and they speak of
Him and talk to Him with a familiarity that is absolutely startling. They
pray as though they thought Christ himself was standing in the very
room.” Even though he considered the preachers "very rude and uncul¬
tivated,” exhibiting little understanding of the Bible, he would conclude
from his observations that the freedmen were "the only people I ever met
whose religion reacted on their daily life.” 19

What appalled the white missionaries and visitors about black reli¬
gious worship made by far the deeper impression—the emotional wildness
and extravagance, the unlettered preaching, the "incoherent speeches and

460

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

prayers,” the "narrowness” of the religious knowledge, and the evidently
strong survivals of supersitition and paganism. "My spirit,” said one mis¬
sionary, "sinks within me in sorrow to think of their noisy extravagance
around the altar of my blessed Lord, who is the God of order not confusion.”
While some observers claimed to be deeply moved by the "soul thrilling”
hymns and the "melodious responses” to the sermons, others found them
"ludicrous.” While some thought the shuffling, clapping, cries, shouts, and
groans blended into "a kind of natural opera of feeling,” others considered
them a vulgar display of paganism without any redeeming religious virtue.
Rather than try to understand the role of tone, gesture, and response in the
blacks' worship, it would be far easier to ridicule it or to dismiss it al¬
together. "I never saw anything so savage,” the usually tolerant Laura
Towne wrote of the first "shout” she witnessed after coming to the Sea
Islands. No less dismayed, Lucy Chase came away from her first prayer
meeting convinced that the religious feeling of the freedmen was "purely
emotional, void of principle, and of no practical utility”; at the same time,
her supervisor seized every opportunity to impress upon black worshippers
"that boisterous Amens, wild, dancing-dervish flourishes ... and pan-
demoniamics generally, do not constitute religion.” 20

What the well-intentioned northern emissaries failed to appreciate was
precisely the degree to which the freedmen considered the emotional fervor
inseparablefrom worship because it brought them that much closer to God.
It was almost as though white people wished to maintain a distance.

White folks tells stories ’bout ’ligion. Dey tells stories ’bout it kaise dey’s
’fraid of it. I stays independent of what white folks tells me when I shouts.

De Spirit moves me every day, dat’s how I stays in. White folks don’t feel
sech as I does; so dey stays out.... Never does it make no difference how
Fs tossed about. Jesus, He comes and saves me everytime. I’s had a hard
time, but Fs blessed now—no mo’ mountains.

The testimony of this former South Carolina slave suggests what so many
of the missionaries appeared to have missed—that the slaves over more
than a century had fashioned a Christianity adapted to their circum¬
stances. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a missionary of a very different
sort as commander of a black regiment, may have been unique in this
respect. Unlike Lucy Chase, he had no difficulty in finding a "practical
utility” in black religious worship; in fact, he would be forced to conclude,
in retrospect, that "we abolitionists had underrated the suffering produced
by slavery among the negroes, but had overrated the demoralization. Or
rather, we did not know how the religious temperament of the negroes had
checked the demoralization.” 21

But such insight was all too rare. When a teacher in Beaufort, South
Carolina, suggested that "our work is just as much missionary work as if
we were in India or China,” she actually underestimated the task many
missionaries thought they faced in the post-emancipation South. If it were

The Gospel and the Primer

461

only a matter of introducing Christianity to heathens, that was a work with
which they were familiar and, as one missionary conceded, * we should
know how to proceed.” How to bring order, decorum, and intelligence into
Christian worship, how to show the freedmen the difference between
"sense and sound,” and how to eradicate the "mass of religious rubbish”
which had collected over two centuries of slavery posed some very different
problems from those encountered in missionary endeavors overseas. After
all, these people had already been won over to Christ, they had for many
years attended some kind of church or service, and they had experienced
either a white minister or a slave preacher—and often both. Even if usually
"unlettered,” the slave preacher or plantation exhorter had shared with
them some trying times, he may have introduced them to the Gospel, and,
most importantly, he knew how to communicate with them and with God.
With that in mind, a missionary in Norfolk, Virginia, warned that a
strange minister who presumed to question how the former slaves chose to
manifest their belief in God might not be welcomed into their community.

They feel that religion is something they possess—they do not feel their
need of religious instruction from the pulpit—for they have always had
it here—they have been obliged to listen to white ministers provided, or
placed over them by their masters, while they have had men among
themselves whom they believe were called of God to preach, who were
kept silent, by the institution from which they are now freed—& to have
white preachers still placed over them, is too much like old times to meet
with their approval. Their long silent preachers want to preach & the
people prefer them.

While agreeing that educated ministers were preferable, she advised her
supervisors in the North that the freedmen would have to be educated
themselves before they could appreciate that virtue in their ministers.
That being the case, she requested that no more clergymen be dispatched
to her region, "unless they are specially asked for—by the church over
which they are to preside as pastors.” 22

Whatever church they chose to affiliate with, and whether a northern
minister or a native preacher presided, the freedmen would not give up
easily the religious practices and fervor that had sustained them through
so many trials. It was not that they were unwilling to learn new ways but
only that they often found these new ways too far removed from God’s
presence. Not long after the close of the Civil War, a black woman rose
during a religious meeting and felt called upon, perhaps because of the
presence of some northern white visitors, to defend the worship to which
she still felt committed.

I goes ter some churches, an’ I sees all de folks settin’ quiet an’ still, like
dey dunno know what de Holy Sperit am. But I fin’s in my Bible, that
when a ma n or a ’ooman gets full ob de Holy Sperit, ef dey should hoF

462

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

dar peace, de stones would cry out; an’ ef de power ob God can make de
stones cry out, how can it help makin’ us poor creeturs cry out, who feels
ter praise Him fer His mercy. Not make a noise! Why we makes a noise
’bout ebery ting else; but dey tells us we mustn’t make no noise ter praise
de Lord. I don’t want no sich ’ligion as dat ar. I wants ter go ter Heaben
in de good ole way. An’ my bruddren an’ sisters, I wants yer all ter pray
fer me, dat when I gits ter Heaben I wont nebber come back ’gain.

No sooner had she taken her seat than the congregation added their con¬
firmation in song.

Oh! de way ter Heaben is a good ole way;

Oh! de way ter Heaben is a right ole way;

Oh! de good ole way is de right ole way;

Oh! I wants ter go ter Heaben in de good ole way.

After the service, which ended in a wild emotional outburst, complete with
shrieks, shouts, and the stamping of feet, the white visitors stood outside
the church shocked and shaken by what they had seen and heard. "A few
moments more, and I think we should have shrieked in unison with the
crowd.... More than one of the party leaned against the wall, and burst
into hysterical tears; even strong men were shaken, and stood trembling
and exhausted.” Several years later, however, this spectator lamented that
the missionaries and benevolent societies had not done enough to correct
such perversions of Christianity. "By our presence and silence,” she wrote
in 1870, "we sanctioned their extravagances; and they stand now self-
confident, proof against remonstrance and instruction.” 23

Even before they embarked for the South, most of the missionaries and
teachers—whites and blacks alike—assumed that nothing short of a mas¬
sive moral and religious transformation could liberate southern blacks
from the remaining vestiges of slavery. But the question of how to structure
that transformation and whether whites or blacks should assume primary
responsibility and leadership precipitated tensions within this biracial
movement that would persist into the Reconstruction Era, with implica¬
tions for the political as well as the moral reformation of the postwar
South. Since early in the war, the appeal had gone out in the northern
black communities for qualified men and women to form their own Gid¬
eon’s Band. "I argue the peculiar fitness of the colored man for that posi¬
tion,” the Reverend Henry M. Turner wrote, "because about him the most
incredulous would have no doubt. Neither could he be bribed by the decep¬
tive flippancy of the oily-tongued slaveocrats, who too often becloud the
understanding of the whites.” 24

The Gospel and the Primer

463

Although nearly every postwar black convention and newspaper
praised the white benevolent societies for their efforts, these same spokes¬
men insisted that "the great work of elevating our race” properly belonged
to black people. If the freedmen were to be taught self-respect, if they were
to be inculcated with pride in their race and begin to view themselves as
the equals of whites, what better examples for them to follow than those
who had already demonstrated in their own lives the capacity for improve¬
ment and leadership. If the freedmen were to be introduced to new forms
of church government and worship, would not black ministers be the ideal
guides, since they would at once remove "the greatest stigma” that could
be attached to such reforms—"that ofbeing a 'white man’s religion.’ ” And
if the freedmen were to be encouraged to drop "the old broken brogue
language” of slavery, they should listen to "enlightened” and educated
ministers of their own color who spoke "in plain English.” 25

With blacks undertaking responsibility for their own people, the po¬
tential for a conflict of interest would also be minimized. Although the
emissaries of both races in the South stressed the importance of former
slaves returning to work and proving their capacity for free labor, the
suspicion grew that some white missionaries stood to profit materially from
such counsel. Economic and moral objectives were not always easy to sepa¬
rate, as in the Sea Islands, for example, and if the same people who super¬
vised black laborers in the field sometimes taught in the classroom or
preached in the church, the distinctions blurred even more. "The danger
now seems to be—not that we shall be called enthusiasts, abolitionists,
philanthropists,” Laura Towne noted with concern, "but cotton agents,
negro-drivers, oppressors.” Not far from where Miss Towne taught school
in the Sea Islands, the Reverend A. Waddell preached in the First African
Baptist Church, and he obviously thought her concern more than justified.

Some of our white ministerial friends do more in the way of procuring
farms, and keeping our poor race in ignorance, than any thing else. They
are more concerned about the cotton bag than they are about souls. They
pretend, when they are North, that they would come down here and do
any thing for our race in the way of enlightening them; but, instead of
this, when they see the cotton bag, they forget all about Christ and Him
crucified, and the saving of souls.

Equally concerned with "pretended benefactors of the colored race” who
"make lucre the chief idol of their devoted shrine,” Henry M. Turner voiced
the not uncommon fear that white missionaries and teachers, by virtue of
their color and eagerness to be accepted in the communities in which they
worked, might naturally gravitate toward the native whites and be the
more easily beguiled by them. For the black missionary, however, as
Turner quickly noted, "no sumptuous tables, fine chambers, attractive
misses, springy buggies, or swinging carriages” would distract him from his
labors, since "he would find his level only among the colored race.” Not
only would he gain easier access to the homes and social gatherings of the

464

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

freedmen but "his influence and personal identification with them would
go farther than the white man’s” and he would be more apt to expose and
resist schemes which exploited the labor of the freed slaves in the guise of
philanthropic enterprise. 26

The black missionary moved quickly to exploit a critical advantage he
had over his white denominational rivals. He could offer the freedmen an
immediate alternative to the white man’s church and to the white minis¬
ter. "The Ebony preacher who promises perfect independence from White
control and direction carries the col[ore]d heart at once,” an officer in the
American Missionary Association observed. Near Columbia, Kentucky, a
newly freed slave who had some years before been ordained as a deacon and
elder in the white Methodist Episcopal Church needed little persuasion to
transfer his loyalties to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. "I was
offered liberal inducements to continue in the M.E. Church and preach to
my people,” he explained, "but I preferred to come out from under the yoke.
I had been there long enough.” That was reason enough for tens of thou¬
sands of freedmen and freedwomen to abandon the white-dominated
churches for their own facilities, organizations, and preachers; indeed, such
a move became for some as important and symbolic an assertion of freedom
as the decision to separate from the scene of their bondage. For years they
had listened to the white preachers admonish them to embrace their situa¬
tion and obey their worldly masters in order to gain admission to "the
kitchen of heaven.”

When the white preacher come he preach and pick up his Bible and claim
he gittin the text right out from the good Book and he preach: "The Lord
say, don’t you niggers steal chickens from your missus. Don't you steal
your marster’s hawgs.” That would be all he preach.

For years, too, they had put up with the deception and hypocrisy of these
professed men of God, some of whom were themselves slaveholders. "The
man that baptized me,” Susan Boggs observed, "had a colored woman tied
up in his yard to whip when he got home, that very Sunday and her mother
belonged to that same church.... That was our preacher!" Nor did the stale
and empty sermons of the white minister and his manner of worship suc¬
ceed in moving them spiritually or emotionally. "Dat ole white preachin’
wasn’t nothin’,” Nancy Williams recalled. "Ole white preachers used to
talk wid dey tongues widdout sayin’ nothin’, but Jesus told us slaves to talk
wid our hearts.” Inevitably, then, as a former Texas slave suggested, "the
whites preached to the niggers and the niggers preached to themselves.” 27

With many slaves preferring one of their own to preach God’s word,
the arrangement worked out in some churches before the Civil War permit¬
ted the black worshippers to convene separately with their own preacher
or exhorter, though a white man would presumably be present to oversee
the proceedings. Typically, a former Alabama slave recalled, "white fo’ks
have deir service in de mornin’ an’ 'Niggers’ have deirs in de evenin’, a’ter

The Gospel and the Primer

465

dey clean up, wash de dishes, an’ look a’ter ever’thing.... Ya’see 'Niggers’
lack’ta shout a whole lot an’ wid de white fo’ks aPround’em, dey couldn’t
shout jes’ lack dey want to.” Where such liberties were not permitted the
slaves, the master might hire a white preacher to visit the plantation, or
the slaves would simply accompany the master’s family to the white
church and sit in the gallery overlooking the white worshippers. Later in
the day or that night, without the master’s knowledge, the slaves would
gather in their quarters or in the nearby woods to hold the "real meetin’.”
Emancipation, however, enabled blacks to dispense with the secrecy and
the pretense. The black preacher and exhorter no longer needed to accom¬
modate sermons to the needs and presence of the master, nor did black
worshippers need to fear an imminent intrusion by white men into their
services. "Praise God for this day of liberty to worship God!” was how one
freedman described his new status, while another placed his hand on the
shoulder of the black preacher and remarked, "Bless God, my son, we don’t
have to keep watch at that door to tell us the patrollers are coming to take
us to jail and fine us twenty-five dollars for prayin’ and talkin’ of the love
of Jesus. O no, we’s FREE!” 28

Where blacks had once been obliged to worship under a white
preacher, they were now in a position to depose him, hire their own
preacher, and choose their own organizational affiliation. For both the
white minister and the black congregation, the transition of a church from
slavery to freedom could be as traumatic as the simultaneous upheavals
affecting the masters of the plantations and their field hands and servants.
Several days after the fall of Wilmington, North Carolina, nearly 1,600
blacks filled the Front Street Methodist Church, where the Reverend L. S.
Burkhead, a white minister, regularly presided over the predominantly
black congregation. Traditionally, every Sunday morning the class leaders,
all of whom were black, would conduct the sunrise prayer meeting. But the
mood of the assemblage on this first Sunday after Union occupation sug¬
gested at once to the Reverend Burkhead, as he took his seat near the altar,
that this would be a unique service. "The whole congregation was wild with
excitement,” he recalled, "and extravagant beyond all precedent with
shouts, groans, amens, and unseemingly demonstrations.” After the al¬
ready excited throng joined in the singing of a hymn appropriate for the
occasion, "Sing unto the Lord a New Song,” the Reverend William H.
Hunter, a chaplain in one of the black regiments which had helped to
liberate the city, strode to the pulpit upon the invitation of the class lead¬
ers. No military triumph could have afforded him any greater personal
satisfaction than the return to a region in which he had once been a slave,
and he made this immediately clear in his address, with the crowd en¬
thusiastically chanting their responses.

A few short years ago I left North Carolina a slave. (Hallelujah, oh, yes.)

I now return a man. (Amen) I have the honor to be a regular minister

of the Gospel in the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States

466

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

(glory to God, Amen) and also a regularly commissioned chaplain in the
American Army. (Amen) I am proud to inform you that just three weeks
ago today, as black a man as you ever saw, preached in the city of
Washington to the Congress of the United States; and that a short time
ago another colored man was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court
of the United States as a lawyer. (Long, loud and continued applause,
beating on benches, etc.) One week ago you were all slaves; now you are
an free. (Uproarious screamings) Thank God the armies of the Lord and
of Gideon has triumphed and the Rebels have been driven back in confu¬
sion and scattered like chaff before the wind. (Amen! Hallelujah!) I lis¬
tened to your prayers, but I did not hear a single prayer offered for the
President of the United States or for the success of the American Army.
(Amen! O, yes, I prayed all last night, etc.) But I knew what you meant
You were not quite sure that you were free, therefore a little afraid to
say boldly what you felt. I know how it is. I remember how we used to
have to employ our dark symbols and obscure figures to cover up our real
meaning. The profoundest philosopher could not understand us. (Amen'
Hallelujah! That’s so.)

After "the tumultuous uproar” subsided, the Reverend Burkhead, visibly
shaken by the proceedings, retired to his parsonage to consider the implica-
Uons. He thought he had known his parishioners, and he had accepted in
good faith their pledge a few weeks earlier to stand behind him. But that
was before the Union Army appeared and before the black chaplain had
been permitted "to unsettle all their former principles and ideas of subordi¬
nation Now, he surmised from what he had heard, the newly freed slaves
seemed to anticipate a new era in which the whites who had owned them
surrendered their churches, dwellings, and lands and bowed down to them
to receive the manacles of slavery.” Had the Reverend Burkhead known
the outcome of his speculations and fears, he might have praised God and
rested comfortably. But for the moment, at least, like so many of the white
clergymen who had presided over black congregations, he would have more
urgent matters to consider, such as a formal demand by his congregation
that he be deposed and that the church be permitted to affiliate with the
African Methodist Episcopal Church. 29

With SOME FOUR million souls at stake, the struggle for supremacy among
the several Protestant denominations often took on the spirit and the
language associated with the prosecution of a war. Into the breach left by
departing and deposed "rebel” ministers poured native black preachers
and both white and black northern missionaries, and each congregation
captured would be hailed as though an enemy had been routed. "Our cause
has been gaining daily,” the Reverend Cain reported from South Carolina

The Gospel and the Primer

467

"In Columbia, the capital of the State, we have captured all the Methodists,
and are laying the foundation for an immense congregation.” Less than
forty-eight hours after General Sherman entered Savannah, the Reverend
James Lynch was in the city to claim Andrew’s Chapel, previously affili¬
ated with the Methodist Episcopal Church; the white minister had fled, and
under the Reverend Lynch’s exhortations the black congregation voted
overwhelmingly to align itself with the African Methodist Episcopal
Church. Consolidating the gains made by previous missionaries, the Rever¬
end Henry M. Turner reported in early 1866 that Georgia had been secured
for the AME Church. "I have visited every place it was safe to go, and sent
preachers where it was thought I had better not venture. Last night was
the first quiet night I have had for five weeks in succession.” 30

Few triumphs, however, were more gratifying to the African Method¬
ist Episcopal Church than the day in September 1865 when the cornerstone
was laid for a new church building in Charleston. Not only did this mark
the return of the AME Church to a city from which it had been banished
some forty years earlier for complicity in the Denmark Vesey insurrection
plot but the new building would be erected exclusively by black labor and
the architect was none other than Robert Vesey, the son of the executed
insurrectionist. Some three thousand black Charlestonians listened that
day to speeches from a group of black clergymen who would for the next
decade play a dominant role in both the religious and the political history
of the state. By September 1866, a black Charlestonian could proudly
describe eleven colored churches in his city—five Methodist (two of them
affiliated with the AME Church), two Presbyterian, two Episcopalian, one
Congregational, and one Baptist. "The flower of the city,” he also noted,
worshipped at the Episcopalian Church (St. Mark’s), some of "the wealthi¬
est colored families” attended the Methodist Episcopal Church (which had
been reorganized by northern white missionaries), and the Reverend Cain’s
AME Church was made up largely of newly freed slaves. In Charleston, as
in other urban centers where a free Negro community had thrived before
the war, church affiliation often reflected divisions of class, status, and
color within the black community. And if the experience of Ed Barber some
years after the war was in any way typical, those who crossed those lines
in choosing a church might come away disappointed.

When I was trampin' 'round Charleston, dere was a church dere called
St. Mark, dat all de society folks of my color went to. No black nigger
welcome dere, they told me. Thinkin' as how I was bright 'nough to git
in, I up and goes dere one Sunday. Ah, how they did carry on, bow and
scrape and ape de white folks.... I was uncomfortable all de time though,
'cause they was too "hifalootin” in de ways, in de singin', and all sorts
of carryin' ons . 31

Almost conceding defeat at the outset, the Methodist Episcopal Church
(South) did little to check the mass withdrawal of blacks from its ranks.

468

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Within a year after the end of the war, in fact, it had already lost more than
half of its black membership; those who remained would soon be reorga¬
nized into a separate Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. 38 To win over
the departing black Methodists, an often furious battle ensued between the
Methodist Episcopal Church (North) and the African Methodist Episcopal
Church. Despite the impressive number and quality of the missionaries
dispatched South by the northern Methodists and their clear superiority
in financial resources, the black Methodist organizations also did quite
well, demonstrating to their satisfaction that "blood is always more potent
than money.” In some communities, the rivals worked out a "compromise”
by which preachers of both denominations used the same building and took
turns at the pulpit. But at least one black minister who experimented with
that arrangement found it unworkable. "The Apostle said, 'Be not un¬
equally yoked together with unbelievers.’ But in an accommodating sense,
I say be not unequally yoked together with a white man.” Even less charita¬
ble, the Reverend Richard H. Cain viewed his Methodist rival in Charleston
as "this Judas, who comes here to rule over our people with his Yankee rod
of iron,” acting "more like Barnwell Rhett with his slaves, than a minister
of Christ.” 33

What exacerbated the denominational rivalries was the unresolved
question of who had the legal and moral right to the property of those
churches which had formerly serviced the slaves. Although blacks had
often built them, title to the land and the building had invariably been held
in trusteeship for the black congregations by the whites. This issue as¬
sumed particular importance now that black congregations were searching
for places in which to meet. Wherever possible, they would seek to establish
new church structures to make absolutely clear their break with the past
and their new independence in religious affairs. But even where the will
and the labor existed to build their own churches, the resources were not
always available. Until land could be acquired by purchase or rental and
a. building erected, blacks would be forced to hold their services in impro-
vised "brush arbors,” abandoned warehouses, and in their own cabins. On
a plantation in Louisiana, a double cabin which had previously housed two
slave families was subdivided so that black worshippers could meet in one
of the rooms. As you entered,” a visitor noted, "you had your choice—you
could visit the family or go to church.” In many communities, moreover,
the black preacher might be kept in quarters and food by his parishioners
but he would have to appeal elsewhere for anything approaching a salary.
We are not doing so Well here,” one such preacher wrote to the nearest
Freedmen’s Bureau officer, "the People of Smithville are very Poor so
much so that they cannot suport me as their Preacher. For the last three
month I have not had but $8.78. cents from my congregation. I do not know
now I shall get along at this rate.” 34

The spectacle of overwhelming numbers of blacks withdrawing from
the established churches in order to worship by themselves provoked a

The Gospel and the Primer

469

mixed response in the white South. Faced with the choice of permitting the
black congregations to depart or granting them equal privileges and seat¬
ing within the old churches, most whites preferred separation. But the
social convenience this afforded them would have to be weighed against the
risks incurred, and these covered an assortment of fears. If black laborers
without white supervision reverted to indolence and vagrancy, as many
whites expected, black worshippers freed from white surveillance might
presumably fall into the vices of heathenism. Recalling the exodus of
blacks from the white churches, Myrta Lockett Avary thought that was
precisely what happened.

With freedom, the negro, en masse, relapsed promptly into the voo-
dooism of Africa. Emotional extravaganzas, which for the sake of his
health and sanity, if for nothing else, had been held in check by his
owners, were indulged without restraint. It was as if a force long re¬
pressed burst forth. "Moans,” "shouts” and "trance meetings” could be
heard for miles. It was weird.

Voicing an even more common concern, she noted how the blacks who had
participated in these orgies would return to their homes late at night or
at dawn, ''exhausted, and unfit for duty.” 35

The political implications of separation revived even graver concerns
among some native whites. Before the war, recognition of the dangers
posed by independent black religious expression and organization had re¬
sulted in placing them under rigid surveillance and regulation. With eman¬
cipation, however, those restraints could no longer be enforced, and
black-controlled churches and preachers not responsible to the master
would become principal influences in the lives of the freedmen. Much as
the whites had feared, rumors and reports of what transpired in the black
churches suggested not only emotional extravagance but political subver¬
sion. In Mobile, Alabama, for example, several black preachers were ac¬
cused of inculcating the freedmen with doctrines of murder, arson,
violence, and hatred of white people. Not only were whites described in
their sermons as "white devils,” "demons,” or "pro-slavery devils” but the
preachers talked of an impending race war in which the whites would be
exterminated. "He [the black preacher] frequently cried out 'In this hour
of blood who will stand by me?’ and his question ever met with most
enthusiastic replies of 'I will, bless GodP from the assembled auditory.” 36

Whatever the proven capacity of black preachers for insurrectionary
activity, whites had always been aware of that potential but had also
learned over the years to encourage the religious enthusiasm of their slaves
as a way of curbing any revolutionary impulses. Even with separation, the
ability of the church to impose restraint and to divert people from their
own grievances and oppression might still prove to be serviceable to whites.
After describing the organization of several new black churches in Colum¬
bia, South Carolina, a northern correspondent reported how the whites had

470

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

encouraged these efforts in the hope that "they will keep the attention of
restless spirits from speculative politics, which promise so much harm to
the poor negro. When the Reverend Henry M. Turner organized Georgia
blacks into the AME Church and sought to train local preachers to preside
over the new congregations, he found his efforts applauded by the southern
white churches. "They were pleased to see that we were endeavoring to
elevate the colored preachers of the South, instead of flooding the country
with Northern ministers, many of whom might be 'too radical’ for the
times.” 37

Not only did the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau recognize
the authority exercised by the black preacher but they sought to exploit his
influence to restrain recalcitrant blacks and to disabuse the minH« of the
freedmen of any extravagant notions about freedom. The black preacher
might be asked, for example, to explain the new labor contracts to the field
hands and to urge their compliance, while at the same time he would
correct any mistaken expectations they still held about the disposition of
the lands of their former masters. In the presence of a Union officer, who
no doubt nodded his head in approval, a black minister in Louisiana told
a large gathering of freedmen not to delude themselves into thinking they
no longer had a master—they had only changed their master. "Everything
must have a head,” he explained. "The plantation, the house, the steam¬
boat, the army, and to obey that head was to obey the law; to disobey lawful
commands was to disobey the law.” In praising God for their freedom, the
minister concluded, "they must not forget to honor Him by dome their
duty.” 38

But the number of preachers beaten and the many churches burned
to the ground by irate whites testified to the fact that the black minister
did not always play the role expected and demanded of him. If he viewed
himself as the moral and religious caretaker of his people, he would be
drawn inexorably into the political arena. For black churchmen to have
drawn a line between political and religious concerns in the years immedi¬
ately following emancipation would have been ideologically and tactically
impossible. After all, one black journal asked, how could the church stand
apart from politics when the issues in question were civil rights, the suf¬
frage, education, and equal protection under the law? 39 Not surprisingly,
then, in state after state, the political and religious leaders were the same
men. For many of them, preaching the gospel in the aftermath of emanci¬
pation proved to be only a prelude to preaching civil rights in the constitu-
tional conventions, in the state legislatures, and in the United States
Congress.

With justification, the AME Church boasted in 1870 that it had sent
the first missionaries, black chaplains, and the highest black commissioned
officers to the South. More recently, to cap this "glorious record,” it had
provided the first black postmaster in the South, the first black delegate
to a constitutional convention, numerous state legislators, and a United

The Gospel and the Primer

471

N States senator—Hiram R. Revels of Mississippi, who only a few years
earlier had been organizing AME churches in Vicksburg and Jackson. "A
remarkable feature of all these promotions,” the journal of the AME
Church added, "is, that all the men remembered the 'rock whence they
were hewn’—they remain strong African Methodists, and are using their
increased influence to spread its borders.” After assuming his duties as an
organizer for the AME Church in Georgia, the Reverend Henry M. Turner
would become an active figure in the Republican Party and subsequently
serve in the state constitutional convention and in the legislature. The
Reverend Richard H. Cain established a political base in Charleston, where
his Emmanuel Church soon became "one of the strongest political orga¬
nizations in the State”; he would serve in the state constitutional conven¬
tion and in the state senate. The Reverend Jonathan C. Gibbs, who came
to the South as a Presbyterian missionary, would rise to political power in
Florida as secretary of state and superintendent of public instruction. After
years of missionary work in the South, the Reverend James Lynch re¬
turned to Philadelphia to edit the Christian Recorder, but in June 1867 he
announced that "convictions of duty to my race” impelled him to relin¬
quish his editorial post "to go to a Southern State, and unite my destiny
with that of my people, to live with them, suffer, sorrow, rejoice, and die
with them.” That would take him to Jackson, Mississippi, where he quickly
became a leading Republican politico whose popularity elevated him to the
state senate and to the position of secretary of state of Mississippi. 40

With the withdrawal of thousands of blacks from the white-dominated
churches, the black church became the central and unifying institution in
the postwar black community. Far more than any newspaper, convention,
or political organization, the minister communicated directly and regu¬
larly with his constituents and helped to shape their lives in freedom. Not
only did he preach the gospel to the masses in these years but he helped
to politicize and educate them. Many of the black missionaries and clergy¬
men also assumed the position of teachers, and very often the classrooms
themselves were housed in the only available quarters in town—the
church. While northern black missionaries envisaged in an educated minis¬
try and congregation an end to the excesses that marked the religious
worship of southern blacks, even the old slave preachers, many of whom
were illiterate, understood the value of knowledge and implored their
people to make certain that the new generation learned the word of God
in ways that had been denied the parents. "Breddern and sisters!” one such
preacher declared. "I can't read more’n a werse or two of dis bressed Book,
but de gospel it is here—de glad tidings it is here—oh teach your chill'en
to read dis yar bressed Book. It's de good news for we poor coloured folk.” 41
If some elderly blacks flocked to the newly opened freedmen’s schools in the
hope of reading the Bible before they died, the young thirsted for a knowl¬
edge not only of the Scriptures but of those subjects that would help them
to improve their lot in this world.

"Charles, you is a free man they say, but Ah tells you now, you is still a
slave and if you lives to be a hundred, you’ll STILL be a slave, cause you
got no education, and education is what makes a man free!” Nothing that
any missionary educator or Freedmen’s Bureau officer might have told
Charles Whiteside about the value of schooling could have made as deep
an impression as these words with which his master informed him of his
freedom. Few freedmen, in fact, would have failed to appreciate the thrust
of the slaveholder’s remarks. If they looked to any panacea (outside of land)
to free them from mental and physical dependency, they fastened their
hopes on the schoolhouse. The Reverend Richard H. Cain pronounced edu¬
cation as second only in importance to godliness, but many newly freed
slaves might have found it difficult to rank such priorities. "If I nebber does
do nothing more while I live,” a Mississippi freedman vowed, "I shall give
my children a chance to go to school, for I considers education next best ting
to liberty.” 42

Although most masters had managed to overcome their fears of reli¬
gious worship among the slaves, only a very few had dared to extend such
toleration to teaching blacks to read and write. "Everything must be inter¬
dicted which is calculated to render the slave discontented,” was the expla¬
nation once offered by a Supreme Court judge in Georgia for the legislative
restrictions placed on black literacy. Notwithstanding the elaborate pre¬
cautions and legislation, some slaves and larger numbers of freeborn blacks
managed to acquire a smattering of education, whether in clandestine
schools, in the several schools for the freeborn tolerated in certain commu¬
nities, or because of the indulgence of a member of the master’s family. By
virtue of their duties and access to the Big House, the plantation slaves
most likely to have acquired a competence in reading and writing were the
drivers, house servants, and artisans. Whenever the opportunity was there,
some blacks had made the most of it. "These whites don’t read and write
because they don’t want to,” a black preacher observed in 1865; "our people
don’t, because the law and public feeling were against it. The ignorant
whites had every chance to learn, but didn’t; we had every chance to
remain ignorant, and many of us learned in spite of them.” 43 At the time
of emancipation, however, the vast majority of southern blacks were illiter¬
ate—a triumph of sorts for the masters, legislatures, and courts who had
deemed such a condition essential to the internal security of their society.

Like most young slaves, Booker T. Washington had viewed the myster¬
ies of reading and writing from a distance. But the very fact that he was
forbidden these practices of white people excited his curiosity. And when
his mother explained that whites considered rea din g too dangerous for
black people, that made him even more anxious to acquire this skill. "From
that moment,” he would recall, "I resolved that I should never be satisfied

The Gospel and the Primer

473

until I learned what this dangerous practice was like.” On several occa¬
sions, he accompanied his master’s daughter to the schoolhouse door, and
the sight of the young white children inside made an impression upon him
that he would never forget. "I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse
and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.^
That opportunity came for many young blacks in the aftermath of emanci¬
pation, though not all of them were in the best position to enjoy its benefits.
After his family moved away from the farm on which they had been slaves,
young Washington went to work in the salt furnaces and tried on his own
to mak-P some sense out of the spelling book his mother had acquired for
V»im When finally permitted to enroll in the newly opened freedmen’s
school, he still had to work in the furnaces for five hours in the early
morning and for two more hours after classes. Because work demands
made it impossible for him to continue his studies in the day school, he
enrolled in the night school, and it was there, he later recalled, that he
acquired "the greater part” of his elementary education. 44

Nothing could have been more calculated to impress upon slaves the
value of education than the extraordinary measures adopted by their
"white folks” to keep them from it. Even if blacks simply drew on their own
experiences and observations, they had come to recognize that power, influ¬
ence, and wealth in southern society were invariably associated with liter¬
acy and monopolized by the better-educated class of whites. My Lord,
ma’am, what a great thing laming is!” a freed slave exclaimed to a white
teacher in South Carolina. "White folks can do what they likes, for they
know so much more’na we.” No less impressed were some "contraband”
children at Fortress Monroe early in the war. When placed in schools, one
freed slave suggested, these children "thought it was so much like the way
master’s children used to be treated, that they believed they were getting

white.” 45 .

The practical value of education never seemed clearer than in the
aftermath of emancipation, when illiterate black laborers learned from
bitter experience, especially on payday and at contract time, how white
people used "book-larnin’ ” to take advantage of them. To an elderly Louisi¬
ana freedman, that was reason enough to send the children to school, even
if their absence from the fields deprived the parents of their earnings.
"Leaving learning to your children was better than leaving them a fortune;
because if you left them even five hundred dollars, some man having more
education than they had would come along and cheat them out of it all.
Nearly every convention of freedmen in the postwar years dwelled inces¬
santly on this point, seeking to drive home to every black family that
"knowledge is power.” Of course, nearly every black family that had sur¬
vived slavery could readily understand that maxim. "They had seen the
magic of a scrap of writing sent from a master to an overseer,” a missionary
in the Sea Islands noted, "and they were eager to share such power if there
were any chance.” 46

To remain in ignorance was to remain in bondage. That conviction

474

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

alone drew hundreds of thousands, adults and children alike, to the freed-
men’s schools from the moment they opened, some of the prospective stu¬
dents making a pilgrimage of several miles, and many of them forced to
combine their schooling with rigorous work schedules. The very intensity
of their commitment caught both teachers and native whites by surprise.
"They will endure almost any penance rather than be deprived of this
privilege,” a missionary educator in North Carolina observed. To a school
official in Virginia, trying to convey his thoughts about the freedmen’s
enthusiasm for education, the phrase "anxious to learn” was insufficient-
"they are crazy to learn,” he reported, as if their very salvation depended
on it. No doubt many ex-slaves were certain that it did. When asked why
he wished to enroll in a school, an elderly black man quickly replied
Because I want to read de Word of de Lord.” That would permit him,
moreover, as an old Mississippi black man noted, to read all of the Bible,’

not simply the portions the master and mistress had always selected for
their slaves.

Ole missus used tu read de good book tu us, black ’uns, on Sunday eve-
nin’s, but she mostly read dem places whar it says, "Sarvints obey your
masters, an didn’t stop tu splane it like de teachers; an’ now we is free,
dar’s heaps o’ tings in dat ole book, we is jes’ sufferin’ tu lam . 47

If some southern blacks viewed with suspicion the ministers from the
North who presumed to "civilize” their religious worship, they usually
extended an effusive welcome to both white and black teachers. Unable in
many regions to pay the salaries of the teachers, black parents did what
they could to sustain them with gifts of eggs, vegetables, and fruit-any-
thing that might persuade them to remain. "The people sent for tuition 5
eggs and a chicken,” a black teacher in Virginia noted. Delighted that a
school had been opened in her neighborhood, a freedwoman vowed to
work her fingers off” if necessary to send her children there. This was the
first tune in her life, she told the teacher, that any white person had shown
any interest in her or in her children; until now, she had been driven,
kicked about, and made to work for others for nothing. When teachers
encountered resistance from native whites, freedmen in some places stood
gurnd outside their lodgings and the schoolhouse, alternating day and
night shifts with their own work schedules. In Augusta, Georgia, Asa B.
Whitfield, who had learned to write in a freedmen’s school, expressed his
patitude to the teacher in the terms he knew best. "We know that Christ
is our best friend because he suffered the most painful treatment for us.
Now I will say that the teachers are suffering on the account of us And
they are our most perticular friends.” 48

But no matter how fully committed they might be to the principle of
schoolmg not all black parents could afford the luxury of losing the labor
of their children. As teachers and school officials would quickly discover,
the turnover in students and erratic attendance usually reflected work

The Gospel and the Primer

475

demands and planting seasons, and in some places teachers tried to adjust
their instruction to accommodate the laborers. "We work all day,” a group
of freedmen in Macon, Georgia, explained to the teacher, "but we’ll come
to you in the evening for learning, and we want you to make us learn; we’re
dull, but we want you to beat it into us!” Many of her students, a teacher
reported from New Bern, North Carolina, were unable to leave work before
eight o’clock in the evening but they still insisted on spending at least an
hour afterwards "in earnest application to study.” Even when at work,
however, some freedmen took their primers with them, much to the neglect
of their duties. "I dont wonder E. learns so fast and reads so well,” one pupil
told his teacher, "for while she sits in the field watching the crows, she
minds her book so hard they come and eat up her corn.” 49

The demand for schools increased so rapidly that the initial problem
lay not in finding willing students but in hiring teachers and locating
quarters to house the classes. Until new structures could be built with
money raised by the freedmen or donated by the northern benevolent
societies, almost any place would have to suffice—a mule stable (Helena,
Arkansas), a billiard room (Seabrook plantation, Sea Islands), a courthouse
(Lawrence, Kansas), an abandoned white school (Charleston), the planta¬
tion cotton house (St. Simon’s Island), warehouses and storerooms (New
Orleans), and, most commonly, the black church. Where buildings could
not be found, whether because of the expense or white opposition, classes
might alternate from day to day in the cabins of the freedmen. Some of the
more unusual temporary school quarters evoked memories that would be
lost on neither teachers, students, nor visitors. In Savannah, the Bryant
Slave Mart was converted into a school; the windows in the three-story
brick structure still had their iron grates, the handcuffs and whips found
inside became instant museum pieces, and the children were taught in
what had been the auction room. In New Orleans, a slave pen became the
Frederick Douglass School, with the auction block now serving as a globe
stand. And when the old cotton house on Tom Butler King’s plantation in
Georgia was turned into a Sabbath school, a missionary teacher was moved
to write: "Strange transition from the rattle of the cotton gin, to the sweet
songs of Zion, but this is a day of great changes, when God is overturning
old systems, old practices, to give place to new, and I trust better.” Not far
from this scene, a visitor in Augusta, Georgia, observed classes in a small
room above a store—the same place where the teacher had imparted les¬
sons clandestinely during the war. "I was shown the doors and passages by
which they used to escape and disperse, at the approach of white per¬
sons.” 50

When field hands on a plantation near Selma, Alabama, erected a
schoolhouse near where they worked, they were fulfilling an agreement
made with their employer: he would furnish the materials and they would
perform the labor and pay for the teacher out of their earnings. Such
arrangements were by no means rare in the postwar South. Whether to
entice his former slaves to remain with him or to attract laborers, the

476

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

planter might offer them facilities for the education of their children. More
often, the blacks themselves demanded a plantation school as a condition
of employment and insisted that such a clause be written into the contract.
Not all planters were necessarily averse to such an arrangement, for they
believed it would help to keep laborers content, discourage premature
departures from the plantation, and enable them to retain "the better
class” of former slaves to perform the work. Even where such agreements
were reached, however, implementation tended to vary from place to place,
depending on the attitude of the planter and the persistence of his laborers.
Once a contract had been signed, a Freedmen’s Bureau superintendent of
education reported from Ar k a n sas, "the school is, in some cases, purpose¬
ly left to run down under an incompetent or intemperate teacher.” Nor
were the results always satisfactory when the planter himself undertook
to teach the school. "Massa teach school for us at night,” a former Texas
slave recalled. Us learn ABC and how spell cat and dog and nigger.
Den one day he git cross and scold us and us didn’t go back to school no
more.” 51

Although a few states began to take some faltering steps toward estab¬
lishing schools for whites and blacks, the development of a system of tax-
supported public education would be largely an achievement of Radical
Reconstruction. During the interim years, the work of educating the newly
freed slaves would have to be undertaken by the freedmen themselves, and
by that host of white and black teachers who came to the South in the wake
of Union occupation. As the northern emissaries boarded the ships and
trains that brought them to their various destinations, and as they began
their work, they came increasingly to believe that the very wisdom of
emancipation itself was at stake—whether or not black people possessed
the capacity for mental improvement and would be able to function as
citizens and free workers in a competitive, white-dominated civilization.

"The best way to take Negroes to your heart,” Mary Chesnut once ob¬
served, "is to get as far away from them as possible.” When this plantation
mistress confided these remarks to her diary in 1862, she had in mind not
herself but those northern do-gooders like Harriet Beecher Stowe who
wrote so authoritatively about people of whom they were personally igno¬
rant and from whom they would no doubt recoil at meeting face to face.

Topsys I have known, but none that were beaten or ill-used. Evas are
mostly in the heaven of Mrs. Stowe’s imagination. People can’t love
things dirty, ugly, and repulsive, simply because they ought to do so, but
they can be good to them at a distance; that’s easy. You see, I cannot rise
very high; I can only judge by what I see.

477

The Gospel and the Primer

But even Mary Chesnut, for all of her insights into the character of whites
and blacks, could not have anticipated the sight of scores of Yankee
"schoolmarms” descending upon her native South to work on a day-to-day
basis with the same people who had previously been the objects ofdistant
solicitude and verbal indulgence. "I have written and politized about
them,” a teacher wrote from Norfolk in 1864, "but:now,1 see.the realityand
that has the highest coloring of aU! ... O Mr. Wlupple! What -shall .say?
my heart is full. My sensitive spirit was lacerated through and through by
the sights and sounds I heard and witnessed last Sunday No Eva shed m
tears in one day than fell streaming down my cheeks last Sabbath.

To redeem the oppressed, the ignorant, and the fallen was the finest

kind of missionary work, and since the early days to

various evangelical and nonsectarian societies m the North had begun to
dispatch teachers to the South to instruct the newly freed slaves in the
ways of "civilization” and freedom. The American Missionary Association,
the most prominent of these societies, set the proper tone for the entire
missionary effort when it called upon its people in 1863 to take the freed-
men "by the hand, to guide, counsel and instruct them in their new life,
protect them from the abuses of the wicked, and direct then energies so as
to make them useful to themselves, their families and their country.
Recognizing the stabilizing influence of education as well as £e demon¬
strated eagerness for it, the Freedmen’s Bureau made its best effort in this
field of activity, providing materials, facilities, rations, transportation tor
teachers, and considerable encouragement and supervision, while the
northern freedmen’s aid societies supplied and paid the teachers.

Like the Union soldiers who preceded them, the missionary teachers
and educators came to the South with a number of assumptions and expec¬
tations about the people they sought to elevate to a higher level o f intellect
and morality. The effects of a lifetime of bondage, they suspected, had
dulled the minds of its victims, debased their morals, demeaned their
character, destroyed their self-respect, and rendered them incapable of
firing- care of themselves. Marcia Colton, a missionary worker in Virginia,
claimed that her conversations with returned missionaries from Africa and
her previous familiarity with Negroes as slaves permitted her to minister
to the freedmen "with more Charity, & less expectation” than most of her
co-workers. "I did not expect to find with them generally, any mce distinc¬
tion of propriety or Chastity.” Nor did Lydia Maria Child, a veteran aboli¬
tionist, think any of her friends who chose to teach in the South should
harbor any false illusions about what they would find there. I doubt
whether we can treat our colored brethren exactly as we would if they were
white, though it is desirable to do so. But we have kept their minds in a
state of infancy, and children must be treated with more patience and
forbearance than grown people.” Much like their antislavery anteceden s,
the freedmen’s aid societies, as "the wisest and best friends” of the Negro,
refused to Haim that the African race was the equal of the Anglo-Saxon.
But neither would they concede that blacks were necessarily inferior.

478

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

They simply assert that the negro must be accorded an opportunity for
development before his capacity for development can be known.”.This was,
of course, sound abolitionist gospel, steeped in the conviction of antebellum
reform that untrammeled individual development alone should determine
place in society. 54

For many of the missionary teachers, this was their first visit to the
South, and the initial impressions they formed of the blacks they encoun¬
tered would tap a wide range of emotions. At the outset, the sheer numbers,
blackness, and demeanor of these people would have to be absorbed. Eliza¬
beth Botume, for one, tried hard.

Negroes, negroes, negroes. They hovered around like bees in a swarm.
Sitting, standing, or lying at full-length, with their faces turned to the

sky. Every doorstep, box, or barrel was covered with them_Words fail

to describe their grotesque appearance. Fortunately they were oblivious
to all this incongruity. They had not yet attained distinct personality;
they were only parts of a whole; once "massa’s niggers,” now refugees
and contrabands.

Although experience would force the teachers to revise some of the assump¬
tions they brought with them to the South, what they espied in the condi¬
tion and moral deportment of the freed slaves tended to confirm the
previous image of "helpless grown up children” with well-developed habits
of indolence, dependency, and licentiousness and skilled in the arts of
deception and thievery. But like any good abolitionist, the missionary
teacher regarded these vices as the natural consequences of a lifetime of
slavery, not innate racial characteristics. If these people were childlike,
that was because they had been denied the necessary tools for development.
If they were sometimes thieves, they had acquired the habit to supplement
their meager rations. If they were easily led into unchastity, they had only
modeled their behavior after their masters’. If they dissembled and
shielded each other, they had developed those arts in order to survive. If
they were ragged and dirty in appearance, they had "lived so long in a
filthy condition they don’t know what it is to be clean.” Besides, much of
what the teachers saw seemed almost surprisingly familiar, and they were
quick to compare the freedmen with the Irish who inhabited the northern
cities. After noting that the southern blacks looked "wretched and stupid,”
a Boston teacher in South Carolina added that "to those who are accus-
tomed to many Irish faces, these except by their uniformity c[oulld suggest
few new ideas of low humanity.” 55

Even if the first impressions tended to confirm expectations, that did
not always diminish the shock or revulsion a number of the teachers expe¬
rienced in their daily encounters with the freedmen. "It is one thing to sit
in ones office or drawing room and weave fine spun theories in regard to
the Negro character,” a teacher wrote from Beaufort, North Carolina, "but
it is quite another to come into actual contact with him. I fail to see those

The Gospel and the Primer

479

beauties and excellencies, and the 'Uncle Toms/ that some do. Is it reason¬
able, in short, to suppose that people brought up, or rather who have come
up under such influences, would be altogether lovely.” That was the kind
of observation a Mary Chesnut might have pounced upon to prove her point
that northern reformers dealt best with their wards at a distance. What she
may not have been prepared for, however, was how these missionary teach¬
ers would act upon their feelings of shock and dismay. The more they saw
and experienced, in fact, the more many of them came to believe that there
could be no greater missionary field anywhere in the world; the shock and
dismay many of them confessed to only seemed to heighten their sense of
purpose, even driving them into outbursts of sheer exultation over their
work. "The prattle of infancy has always been pleasant to me,” one teacher
wrote, "yet to live in daily communion with two or three hundred of this
infant race, to watch the latent fires of intelligence in their first develop¬
ment, is happiness.” No less inspired, a teacher in Louisiana found himself
"happy when surrounded with their dusky faces and glistening eyes”; a
teacher in South Carolina found her work to be "a joy and glory for which
there are not words”; a teacher in North Carolina claimed to have over¬
come in two months the doubts and "personal antipathies” with which she
began her mission; and a teacher in Virginia reported, "I think I shall stay
here as long as I live, and teach this people. I have no love or taste for any
other work, and am happy only here with them.” 56

Neither the magnitude nor the complexity of the task they faced
seemed nearly as awesome to the missionary teachers and educators as the
opportunity to stamp their image on nearly four million newly freed slaves.
"We can make them all that we desire them to be,” exulted a teacher in
New Bern, North Carolina. That thought alone helped to sustain the north¬
ern emissaries in their daily labors and to overcome the disappointments
and frustrations they would experience. To make the freedmen "all that
we desire them to be” was to instruct them not only in the spelling book
and the gospel but in every phase of intellectual and personal development
—in the virtues of industry, self-reliance, frugality, and sobriety, in family
relations and moral responsibility, and, most importantly, in how to con¬
duct themselves as free men and women interacting with those who had
only recently held them as slaves. In seeking to enlist the support of a
prominent planter in his district, a freedmen’s educator in North Carolina
phrased educational objectives in such a way as to disarm any potential
critics.

We start with the principle that to rescue the Freedmen from vice and
crime, they must be intelligent and virtuous. To become intelligent and
virtuous they must be taught.... Their [the teachers’] business is not
only to teach a knowledge of letters, but to instruct them in the duties
which now devolve upon .them in their new relations—to make clear to
their understanding the principles by which they must be guided in all
their intercourse with their fellowmen—to inculcate obedience to law

480

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

ami respect for the rights and property of others, and reverence for those
in authority; enforcing honesty, industry and economy, guarding them
against fostering animosities and prejudices, and against all unjust and
indecorous assumptions, above all, indoctrinating them in the Gospel of
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ . 57

Both the northern societies and the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized the
value of education in preparing the blacks for practical life, and neither
would have understood the need to draw any distinctions between teaching
freedmen to read and write and making productive free laborers of them
The education of the freedmen, as many a school official argued, should in
fact be designed to ensure their diligence and faithfulness in the workplace.
Any teacher, then, might be called upon to lecture the blacks on the need
to comply with the terms of labor contracts. When field hands in the Sea
Islands grew restive over a recent wage settlement, Laura Towne, along
with several other teachers, found herself "borrowed and driven to the
different plantations to talk to and appease the eager anxiety.” For the few
teachers who felt ill-used when asked to perform such duties, the resent¬
ment might manifest itself in spending more time teaching the freedmen
how to protect themselves from unscrupulous employers who manipulated
figures and the language of contracts to keep their workers in perpetual
debt. Had only more teachers addressed themselves to such concerns, a
black North Carolinian argued some years later, the difficulties encoun¬
tered by freedmen in the making and enforcing of contracts might have
been minimized. "What we want among freedmen,” he added, "is an educa¬
tion that will not only look after their immortality, but also their cor¬
poreity. The denomination that will bless the freedmen most is the one that
looks most after soul and body.” 58

, Although priorities differed among individual teachers, many of them
did feel compelled not only to impart universal middle-class values but to
attack the special deficiencies they perceived in a people who had been
denied the barest rudiments of learning. Based on their assessment of the
needs of their students, that would entail instruction in the days of the
week, the months, weights, measures, and monetary values, how to calcu¬
late their ages, the shape of the world, proper forms of address, and the
history of mankind. "Suffice it to say,” the Reverend Henry M. Turner
counseled prospective teachers and missionaries, "they need instruction in
every thing, and especially the little things of life, such points of attention
as thousands would never stoop to surmise.” Moreover, a people "who had
never had a country to love” needed to be taught sentiments of patriotism
and an appreciation of how they came to be freed. Rather than separate
such lessons from the basic skills of reading and writing, teachers would
invariably combine them, much as the primers they used did. Through
appropriate readings, songs, and exercises, positive moral and patriotic
images would be implanted in the minds of the pupils. In teaching the
alphabet, each letter might introduce a couplet conveying some moral or

The Gospel and the Primer

481

value, and in at least one instance an elderly black student composed his
own twenty-six verses, with the letters "G,” "K,” and "Q,” for example,
communicating thoughts few of his classmates could have failed to compre¬
hend.

God fix all right
Twix’ black and white.

King Cotton’s ded

And Sambo’s fled.

Quashee was sold
When blind and old.

Similarly, teachers devised dialogues which their pupils would memorize
and then often recite to visitors, and many of these consisted of historical
lessons with an undisguised New England bias.

Q. Where were slaves brought to this country?

A. Virginia.

Q. When?

A. 1620.

Q. Who brought them?

A. Dutchmen.

Q. Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?

A. Pilgrims.

Q. Did they bring slaves?

A. No. 59

To succeed in the classroom, many teachers felt they needed only to
capitalize on the eagerness with which their pupils had grasped the oppor¬
tunity to come to them. If additional incentives were deemed necessary,
instructors and school officials were apt to differ whether or not these
should be largely psychological, material, or corporal. To impress upon his
students the need to learn their lessons well, a teacher in North Carolina
warned them that they were being watched closely by enemies who wished
to see the entire experiment in black education fail. Edwin S. Williams,
teaching in St. Helena Village, South Carolina, claimed success in using
more substantial rewards to emphasize certain lessons, as in accompanying
"a piece of beef with an injunction to make it relish by industry,” or by
providing the pupils with extra molasses while giving them "a vigorous
stirring up about their smoky rooms & dirty clothes.” Nevertheless, some
teachers frankly confessed their inability to maintain classroom discipline,
and others felt their effectiveness impaired by the need to teach large
numbers of pupils of various ages and grade levels in the same room. "I
acknowledge that it was not a very pleasant one,” a black teacher wrote
of her first day in the classroom. "Part of my scholars are very tiny,—
babies, I call them—and it is hard to keep them quiet and interested while
I am hearing the larger ones.” 60

482

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

Traditionally, teachers seldom hesitated to mete out a sound thrashing
to enforce their authority and maximize their instruction. But corporal
punishment might have a very different meaning for a former slave than
for a white youth, and that consideration alone prompted some freedmen’s
school officials to forbid it. The reports of teachers, however, suggest that
this prohibition was neither universally obeyed nor respected. In Charles¬
ton, a teacher insisted that whipping a freedman in the classroom could not
be compared with whipping a slave in the field, especially if "a kind and
serious talk” with the recalcitrant pupil followed the thrashing. That, she
observed, "seems to astonish them into good behavior, for they appear to
have been accustomed to threats rather than kindness, and have been
driven to feel that anger rather than love governed those who whipped
them.” Whether deservedly or not, black teachers were reputed to be the
harshest disciplinarians, and some of them refused to be defensive about
it. After all, a black teacher in New Orleans noted, many of his pupils had
been plantation slaves and consequently knew no motive for obedience
other than fear of punishment. "Coax ’em and they’ll laugh at you; you’ve
got to knock ’em about, or they won’t think you’ve got any power over ’em.”
Nor were black parents necessarily averse to seeing their children pun¬
ished, if necessary to instill proper learning habits, but they madp it clear
that they would tolerate a whipping only if meted out by "a Yankee
teacher” and not by a native white. 61

Fully aware of the pervasive theories in American society which as¬
sumed the mental inferiority of the African race, the teachers and supervi¬
sors in the freedmen’s schools needed periodically to assess the results of
their efforts and to report them to a curious and skeptical public. But
measuring success and progress was not always easy, and each teacher
different priorities. For many, the acquisition of basic learning skills—
reading and writing—was sufficient proof of success; still others looked to
the performance of black pupils in advanced subjects or chose to stress
perceptible improvements in physical appearance, demeanor, and personal
habits. "We now see civilization stamped on these schools,” a superinten¬
dent reported from Fernandina, Florida. "Instead of rags and filth, there
is decent clothes and cleanliness; instead of the vacant half-frightened
stare and low slavish tone, there is an intelligent eye and more erect
bearing, and full tone.” Antoinette Turner, a teacher in New Bern, North
Carolina, derived particular satisfaction from the efforts her pupils mad P
to discard the dis and 'dat,’ so peculiar to them,” while an equally grat¬
ified instructor in Maryland noted his success in persuading the adults in
his class to discard common nicknames like "Uncle Jack” and "Aunt Sal-
lie” in favor of "the respectable names of Mr. and Mrs. Brown.” 62

But the critical question, as every educator understood, came down to
a comparison of their pupils with white students in the North, both in the
rapidity with which they acquired basic skills and their demonstrated
aptitude in more advanced subjects. Few needed to be reminded that the
manner in which they decided this issue went to the very heart of their

The Gospel and the Primer

483

efforts, indeed to the legitimacy of the "experiment” itself. Nearly every
teacher and supervisor made the inevitable comparison, some with greater
detail than others. The clear consensus was that black pupils learned as
rapidly as the average white child in a northern school. When they pro¬
ceeded to particularize that observation, however, many of them seemed
to suggest an inequality of intellectual talents and perhaps even of capac¬
ity. Not unlike the stereotype already formed of black pupils in northern
schools, the freedmen were generally thought to excel in subjects entailing
rote memory and imitation and to be less proficient than whites in fields
of study requiring the application of logic and induction, "powerful reason¬
ing,” and "inventive” and reflective powers. Having made these distinc¬
tions, some teachers added that such powers were not beyond the reach of
blacks once they were permitted to develop their full potential. In the
meantime, black pupils might have taken some consolation in the observa¬
tions of their teachers that they were more emotional and affectionate than
whites, more "graphic and figurative in language,” and clearly superior in
wit, cunning, and musical expression. "How musical they are!” more than
one teacher would remark, and Mary E. Burdick apparently exploited that
faculty every chance she had. "I doubt if the same number of whites could
produce half the melody they can in simply singing the multiplication
table. I thought it exceeded every thing!” 63

To display the talents of their students, both white and black teachers
in the freedmen’s schools scheduled periodic programs and recitations,
many of them specifically designed to impress the host of northern visitors,
officials, and correspondents who descended upon these schools. No day
passed without some visitation, Elizabeth Botume observed, and she con¬
fessed a low regard for the ways in which the guests often conducted
themselves in the presence of her pupils.

I wish to ask why so many well-intentioned people treat those who are
poor and destitute and helpless as if they were bereft of all their five
senses. This has been my experience. Visitors would talk before the
contrabands as if they could neither see nor hear nor feel. If they could
have seen those children at recess, when their visit was over, repeating
their words, mimicking their tones and gestures, they would have been
undeceived.

In the typical school program, the students recited various exercises, en¬
gaged in carefully rehearsed dialogues with their teacher, and culminated
the proceedings with a rousing chorus of "John Brown’s Body” or perhaps
an old spiritual. And the northern guests would invariably leave the school
very much impressed with this "startling” exhibition of black talent. 64

But these displays raised a troublesome question. Did the "surprise”
and "astonishment” registered by teachers, superintendents, and visitors
alike over the intellectual attainments of black pupils reflect a different
standard of expectation and measurement than they would have applied

484

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

to white pupils? Long before the Civil War, a black newspaper in the North
had raised this question in noting the praise lavished on black students by
school visitors and wondered if the same performance from white pupils
would have excited the slightest attention. If anything, the temptation to
magnify black achievements in the classroom would have been far greater
in the postwar South, and some teachers frankly thought the emphasis on
producing measurable results as quickly as possible was not only educa¬
tionally unsound but demeaning to black people.

I find it a great fault, in nearly all the schools for Freedmen, that the
children are advanced too rapidly. Before they can read one book with
any degree of care and fluency, they are pushed into another still more
difficult. Teachers do not seem to care about quality but have a great
desire to send home reports of scholars beginning with the alphabet and
their being able to read in the 3rd 4th or 5th readers—in as many
months.

After visiting several freedmen’s schools in North Carolina, Jonathan C.
Gibbs, a black minister, thought the pupils were "doing well as could be
expected, and some much better than I had anticipated,” but he felt the
teachers were doing far too much, "seemingly, for the sake of present
impression, rather than for the solid interests of the children. When I
remember that in a few years these black children will control largely the
future destiny of this southern country and will make it either a hell upon
earth or a paradise, I tremble for the responsible trust which has been
placed in the hands of these improper persons.” 85

That the quality of instruction varied with each teacher was hardly
unique to the education of freedmen. For some teachers, the challenge of
educating recently freed slaves demanded an understanding and patience
they simply did not possess, resulting in a total breakdown in communica-
tion and an early return to the North. Nor did the often inadequate living
quarters, the shortages of books and materials, and the open displays of
white hostility make the life of a freedmen’s teacher any easier. For most
of them, however, the level of commitment remained high enough to with-
stand the inconveniences, the threats, and, in a few instances, the initial
suspicions of the pupils and their parents. The white teacher in Beaufort,
South Carolina, suspended for using derogatory language in referring to
blacks and for habitually using opium was quite exceptional, though such
cases no doubt confirmed the black critics who thought some of the teachers
academically sound but morally weak. Nor would it be easy to assess the
charge of a black preacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, that "some of
the teachers were setting the devil into his people.” 66 In gauging black
reaction to this massive educational effort, far more typical would be the
consternation that swept over a black community when a teacher an¬
nounced his or her departure. Although he loved his "southern friends,”
a black student in Augusta, Georgia, wrote his former teacher, he knew

The Gospel and the Primer

485

that none of them could have faced up to the ordeal experienced by many
of the Yankee teachers.

Now the white people south says that the yankee are no friend to the
southern people. That’s a mistaken idea. The northerners do not advise

us to be at enmety against any race. They teach us to be friends-If

you say the yankee is no friend how is it that the ladies from the north
have left there homes and came down here? Why are they laboring day
and night to elevate the collord people? Why are they shut out of society

in the South? The question is plain. Answer it-I’m going to school now

to try to learn some thing which I hope will enable me to be of some use
to my race. These few lines will show that I am a new beginner. I will try,
and do better.... Thank God I have a book now. The Lord has sent us
books and teachers. We must not hesitate a moment, but go on and learn
all we can. 67

Least impressed by the public displays of black intellectual capabilities
were the native whites, many of whom reacted to the educational experi¬
ment in their midst with varying degrees of amusement, skepticism, suspi¬
cion, and outright hostility. For some whites, the only uncertainty was
whether to fear or to ridicule the strange spectacle of black youths and
adults, only recently their slaves, marching off to places where they would
imbibe lessons from Yankee schoolmarms. "I have seen many an absurdity
in my lifetime,” remarked a Louisiana legislator upon viewing his first
black pupils, "but this is the climax of absurdities!” Once white Southern¬
ers grew accustomed to such sights, if they ever could, they would differ
about the benefits and dangers black education posed. Voicing a position
that would gain a respectable hearing in some circles, a magistrate in
Sumter, South Carolina, argued that the same concern for public safety
which had once required Negroes as slaves to be kept ignorant now re¬
quired that Negroes as freedmen be enlightened in the responsibilities of
citizenship. 88

Consistent with this theme of accommodation, the "better class” of
whites suggested that with "the right kind of teachers,” the newly freed
slaves could be taught a proper deference for their superiors, fidelity to
contracts, respect for property, the rewards of industriousness, and other
virtues calculated to ensure an orderly transition to free labor. That pros¬
pect could induce a Florida planter to believe "the best way to manage the
Negroes now is to educate them and increase as far as practicable their
wants and dependence upon the white man.” With an equal appreciation
for proper priorities, a planter in North Carolina informed a freedmen’s
educator that "a due observance of law and order, an improvement in

486

BEEN IN THE STOEM SO LONG

morals, and decent respect for the rights and opinions of others—properly
inculcated & impressed on the minds of the Freedmen,” would no doubt
be tolerated in his community, though he cautioned the official not to ex¬
pect "any demonstrations of delight. ” Rather than openly oppose the edu¬
cation of the freedmen, then, some whites insisted on withholding their
judgments until they could begin to ascertain the results. While "decidedly
in favor” of black parents educating their children, a newspaper in Waco,
Texas, made it clear that "we do not approve their sending their children
to school from a mere hifalutin idea of making them smart and like white
folks.” 69

Even if the education of the freedmen was a laudable objective, calcu¬
lated to impress upon them their new duties and responsibilities, many
native whites remained skeptical of the experiment and confidently pre¬
dicted its failure. "I do assure you,” a white woman advised one teacher,
"you might as well try to teach your horse or mule to read, as to teach these
niggers. They can’t learn.” The laws prohibiting the instruction of slaves,
she explained, had been aimed at the house servants and urban blacks.
"Some of these were smart enough for anything. But the country niggers
are like monkeys. You can’t learn them to come in when it rains.” Of
course, the inferior mental capacity of Negroes had long been a staple of
the proslavery argument, confirming as it did their inability to look after
themselves and their need to defer to the superior judgment and wisdom
of their owners. To think now that the minds of black people might be
susceptible to classroom instruction not only contradicted theories which
had the highest academic standing but posed more immediate and more
troublesome questions. If this experiment should prove successful, how
would it affect the proper subordination of blacks in southern society? If
their ambitions were heightened, how could they remain satisfied with
their low economic, social, and political position? Inflated with ideas of
their own importance and capability, would they not certainly become even
more discontented and impudent? "The cook, that must read the daily
newspaper, will spoil your beef and your bread,” a southern educator noted;
"the sable pickaninny, that has to do his grammar and arithmetic, will
leave your boots unblacked and your horse uncurried.” 70

Whatever accommodations whites might make to black education,
such apprehensions never really subsided. The warning sounded by a white
educator late in the century only echoed concerns that were frequently
expressed in the post-emancipation years. "Suppose our educational
schemes succeeded,” he asked; "suppose we elevate him as a race until he
has the instincts and drives of a white man?... Being trained for office he
will demand office. Being taught as a Negro child the same things and in
the same way as the white child, when he becomes a Negro man he will
want the same things and demand them in the same way as a white man.”
That was reason enough to be doubly cautious about the teachers and
curriculum in the education of blacks. And if the path from the schoolhouse

The Gospel and the Primer

487

led to the courthouse and the white man’s parlor and bedroom, then per¬
haps this enterprise should be resisted before it gained any foothold in
southern society. 71

Although whites continued to disagree about the wisdom of educating
black children, the opposition mounted in some areas made it virtually a
moot question. "There are no colored schools down in Surry county,” a
Virginia black testified; "they would kill any one who would go down there
and establish colored schools.... Down in my neighborhood they [the
blacks] are afraid to be caught with a book.” Those whites who opposed his
efforts, a freedmen’s school official observed, were usually more "tacit and
concealed” in their methods than violent, manifesting their resistance in
agreements among themselves not to rent homes or buildings that might
be used for schools and to declare as "nuisances” any schoolhouses erected
by the black residents. Even some of the black churches which had initially
permitted classes to meet in their basements were forced to reconsider the
offer in the wake of threats to deny them insurance because they had
suddenly become fire risks. To read the daily press or the reports of freed¬
men’s school officials was to appreciate, in fact, why any building housing
classes for black pupils became by definition a poor actuarial risk. 72

In nearly every part of the South, but especially in the rural districts,
the destruction of schoolhouses, usually by fire, only begins to suggest the
wave of terror and harassment directed at the efforts to educate blacks.
"We are advised by friends not to be out evenings,” a white teacher wrote
from Little Rock, Arkansas. Amos McCollough, an aspiring black teacher
in Magnolia, North Carolina, pleaded for Federal troops to protect him in
his efforts to establish a school: "I [intended] to open school here in Mag¬
nolia which I did but only proceeded one day. Why? Because the house
which I taught in was threatened of being burnt down.” If not humiliated,
beaten, or forced into exile, many teachers found it nearly impossible to
obtain credit in local stores or to find living quarters, thus forcing them to
board with black families and subjecting them in some states and counties
to arrest as vagrants for cohabiting with black women. The mayor of
Enterprise, Mississippi, defended the arrest of a freedmen’s teacher by
noting that he had been "living on terms of equality with negroes, living
in their houses, boarding with them, and at one time gave a party at which
there were no persons present (except himself) but negroes, all which are
offences against the laws of the state and declared acts of vagrancy.” At the
same time, the mayor affirmed his belief that no one had any objection—
"None whatever”—to a Negro school in the town. 73

The case of the Mississippi teacher illustrates only the more absurd
manifestations of native white resistance to schools for the freedmen. More
often than not, the violence and harassment required no explanation.
When blacks in Canton, Mississippi, raised money among themselves to
build a schoolhouse, they were told that the structure would be burned to
the ground, and a citizens’ committee headed by a local attorney warned

488

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the prospective teacher to leave on the first train or face a public hanging.
When a young female teacher in a freedmen’s school in Donaldsonville,
Louisiana, was killed by a militia patrol, authorities called it an "acciden¬
tal” shooting, thereby moving the New Orleans Tribune to observe: "This
is a series of'accidents’ as seldom accidentally occur in this world.” After
describing a number of recent beatings, stabbings, and whippings, most of
them in the outlying parishes, the same newspaper concluded: "The record
of the teachers of the first colored schools in Louisiana will be one of honor
and blood.” Although many native whites discountenanced attacks on
schools, a missionary educator in Grenada, Mississippi, voiced a common
belief among teachers that such protests were almost always to no avail.
"Tho they [the perpetrators] may be a small minority, the majority dare
not move their tongues against them; but must tacitly consent to what they
do. The colored people are in perpetual fear of them, & well they may be;
for they kill them with almost perfect impunity.” Even where freedmen
schools were tolerated, moreover, teachers found themselves treated by
these same "respectable” whites with "a studious avoidance,” and many a
teacher and superintendent considered the maintenance of their schools
dependent on the nearby Federal garrison. 74

Despite the fears of educators, the withdrawal of Union Army garri¬
sons did not result in a massive dismantlement of the freedmen’s schools.
With i -Vi passing year, in fact, additional numbers of native whites came
around to the view that the education ofblacks—at least on a rudimentary
level—had become an unavoidable consequence of emancipation and that
the white South had best accommodate itself to this reality. That accommo¬
dation would be expedited and the dangers minimized, they suggested to
their people, if steps were taken to control the educational apparatus and
staff the schools with their own kind. This was not necessarily inconsistent
with the belief of some Freedmen’s Bureau educational officers that more
native whites should be employed as teachers, since "they understand the
negro” and would be in a good position to combat the strong feelings
against his education. But others were quick to point out that such teachers
would also be in an ideal position to vent their own frustrations on those
who had previously been their slaves, and there were sufficient examples
to underscore that concern. In one school taught by two native whites, the
children were not only whipped frequently but forced to address their
teachers as "massa” and "missus.” 75

Although some time would elapse before large numbers of native
whites could be induced to teach in black schools, the number steadily grew
in the immediate postwar years, in part because of the feverish search by
some impoverished whites for any kind of remunerative employment.
"While I am on the nigger question,” Sallie Coit wrote a friend, "I must tell
you that my school for them [Negroes] still flourishes.... I hope I can do
them some good. I have the satisfaction of knowing that I put good books
into their hands, while if they went to Yankees they would doubtless have

The Gospel and the Primer

489

books tainted with Abolitionism.” Outright control of the school systems,
along the lines suggested by Sallie Coit, would have to await the overthrow
of Radical Reconstruction; in the meantime, native whites tried to accom¬
modate themselves to the idea of paying taxes for the support of public
schools for both races. "Every little negro in the county is now going to
school and the public pays for it,” wrote one disgruntled planter. "This is
a hell of [a] fix but we cant help it, and the best policy is to conform as far
as possible to circumstances.” Considering other possible reactions, this
represented a triumph of sorts for the cause of black education in the
South. 76

Whatever toleration and public support native whites chose to accord
the freedmen’s schools depended in large measure not only on the conduct
of the teachers but on maintaining a strict segregation between white and
black pupils. "Sir, we accept the death of slavery,” a prominent Savannah
citizen explained, as he remonstrated aga in st the proposed admission of
blacks to the public schools; "but, sir, surely there are some things that are
not tolerable. Our people have not been brought up to associate with
negroes. They don’t think it decent; and the negroes will be none the better
for being thrust thus into the places of white men’s sons.” Pending the
establishment of public school systems, some white parents unable to
afford private instruction for their children chose to send them to the only
available alternative—the freedmen’s schools, where they were sometimes
taught in the same classrooms as the black pupils. Almost as often, how¬
ever, the white parents were forced to withdraw their children because of
overwhelming community pressure. The townspeople "made so much
fuss,” one mother told a teacher, that she had no choice. "I would not care
myself, but the young men laugh at my husband. They tell him he must
be pretty far gone and low down when he sends his children to a 'nigger
school ’ That makes him mad, and he is vexed with me.” 77

Seeking to allay native white fears, and well aware of the strong
feelings on the question of race mixing, the freedmen’s aid societies would
have preferred to avoid the issue. Although official policy called for inte¬
grated schools, implementation varied with local circumstances and also
depended on the willingness of missionary teachers to undertake the in¬
struction of poor whites as well as blacks. The controversy that erupted in
Beaufort, North Carolina, was unique only because H. S. Beals, an educa¬
tional officer of the American Missionary Association, maintained a sepa¬
rate school for poor whites and because a co-worker chose to make an issue
of it. Defending the schools, Beals considered them an accommodation to
white sensitivities and to the urgent need to educate any child, white or
black, who chose to come to them. To integrate the white school, he warned,
would "scatter that school in a day.” (That was precisely what had hap¬
pened in nearby Raleigh.) He did not question the ideal of integrated
education but thought it less important than reaching as many children as
possible.

490

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

We are right, but the prevailing sentiment of the white people here, is
wrong. Shall we wait to convert them to our ideas, before we give them
what alone will secure that conversion.... The whole race of poor white
children are crying out for this life giving influence. Is it our policy, or
our principle, to hold this multitude, clamoring for intellectual light,
outside the benign influence of schools, till we force them to adopt our
ideas?

Whatever the merits of that question, the Reverend S. J. Whiton, also an
AMA representative in Beaufort, felt a critical principle had been sac¬
rificed, and he charged that the two schools provoked "much excitement
and hard feeling” among the blacks. "The colored people here are watching
curiously to see the result. In their minds the AMA is convicted of saying
one thing and through its agents doing another.” But Whiton’s protest to
AMA officers resulted only in a reprimand for "meddling” and for making
"a very unfortunate and unwise” issue out of a delicate matter, and he
thereupon submitted his resignation from the AMA rather than be identi¬
fied with the perpetuation of racial distinctions. Several black students also
indicated their displeasure with "the White School,” among them Hyman
Thompson, who urged the AMA to return to its original principles. More
of his brethren would have joined the protest, he added, but they feared
"Mr. Beals will not give them clothes or hire them to work if they do.” 78

To black parents, the opportunity to educate their children seemed to
take precedence over whether they would share the same classrooms with
whites. Even while pressing for full and equal access to public facilities and
transportation, without regard to color, many blacks willingly conceded
and some even preferred separate schools, but only if those schools were
equal in quality, comfort, and the allocation of funds to the schools reserved
for whites. In opting for separation, some parents simply wanted to avoid
subjecting their children to the taunts, derision, and harassment of white
pupils. "No, Sir,” a black woman in New Orleans responded when asked
if she would like to see the school system integrated. "I don’t want my
children to be pounded by dem white boys. I don’t send them to school to
fight, I send them to learn.” 79

During the early years of Radical Reconstruction, black delegates to
the constitutional conventions and black legislators in several states would
argue vigorously to outlaw racial distinctions in the schools, and in New
Orleans, the only city where such a system was maintained for a time, the
black newspaper had been an early advocate of integration. In urging the
mayor in 1867 to reject a city ordinance establishing separate schools, the
Tribune maintained that equality before the law would never be fully
realized until an equality of rights pervaded the entire community—"in
customs, manners, and all things of everyday life.” Two years later, in
commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the successful integration
of public schools in Boston, the same newspaper wondered how much
longer the white people of the South would be willing to pay for two sets

The Gospel and the Primer

491

of teachers and two sets of schools. 80 Three more generations, in fact, would
attend separate schools before that dual system began to collapse under a
decision of the United States Supreme Court which echoed the editorial
sentiments of the New Orleans Tribune.

No less disturbing to whites than race mixing in the classroom was the
spectacle ofYankee schoolmarms fraternizing with local blacks and flaunt¬
ing their notions of social equality. "They went in among the negroes, ate
and slept with them, paraded the streets arm-in-arm with them,” one white
southern woman recalled. If some white teachers indulged in such behav¬
ior, native whites relished every opportunity to report it, and the mission¬
ary teachers themselves were not above being "gossipy” about such
matters. "To-day I am informed by letter of an engagement between a
Colored physician and a Yankee teacher,” wrote a concerned instructor
from Columbus, Georgia, to her supervisor. "What do you think of such
alliances? ... The rebs have reported a number of such matches. Now they
can have their sensation and a real cause.” 81

The problem did not lie in liaisons between Yankee schoolmarms and
black men, for these were rare. But the question of social intercourse
between teachers and freedmen outside the classroom and how far pro¬
fessed principles needed to be compromised to appease native whites sur¬
faced frequently enough to become divisive issues within the ranks of the
freedmen’s aid .movement. Nor were those who challenged the wisdom of
such fraternization necessarily any less zealous in their efforts to educate
the freedman or less dedicated to the ideal of equal rights. This was a
matter of tactics, they insisted, not principle. Few stated the view more
clearly than G. L. Eberhart, superintendent of the freedmen’s schools in
Georgia and also a Freedmen’s Bureau officer. To disarm the white critics,
he maintained, "[w]e must be governed in this work by great prudence, and,
so far as we possibly can without any compr[om]ise of principle, or conflict
with truth, be controlled by policy and expediency.” It was not a matter of
rights but of whether the exercise of those rights helped or hindered the
cause to which they had dedicated themselves in the South.

I have, for instance, a perfect right, if my taste run in that way, to
publicly kiss a negro child on the street, or to board and live, on terms
of perfect social equality, with colored people; yet here, I think, every
consideration of prudence and expediency, for the sake of the freed people
alone, forbids the exercise of any such right—forbids it, too, in the most
peremptory manner.

For Eberhart, this was no abstract issue; he voiced his views in a letter
requesting the transfer of several teachers under his jurisdiction who, in

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his estimation, had exceeded "the limits of prudence and propriety.”
Among them was a teacher who had "totally disqualified” herself, not only
by her arrogant manner in and out of the classroom but by the easy
familiarity she had assumed with the blacks, totally disregarding local
fi lling s and customs. "For a white Northern lady here to kiss a colored
child is very imprudent to say the least of it, and, in reply to an insulting
remark made by a white person, to say that the negroes are as good as that
white person, is entirely unnecessary. ” 82

Although some of Eberhart’s associates in the educational movement
might have chosen to be more circumspect in voicing their views on this
delicate matter, few of them would have denied the logic or the necessity
of his position. To listen to some of the missionary educators, the initial call
of their societies to take the black man "by the hand” was to be exercised
with considerable restraint. Any ostentatious display of affection for the
freedmen or violation of local racial codes suggested, in their view, self-
indulgence rather than genuine commitment to the cause and helped nei¬
ther the blacks nor the image of the teacher. But to advise teachers, as did
one educational officer, to "conform to local customs and practices wher¬
ever such conformity will not compromise principle” was to invite disagree¬
ment and controversy over the precise point at which principle had been
compromised. Rather than submit to an order that she refrain from social
intercourse with blacks outside the school (such as receiving them in the
parlor or eating or walking with them), Martha L. Kellogg, a teacher in
Wilmington, North Carolina, requested a new assignment, even if it be "an
isolated position.” And if she could be boarded with a black family in her
new post, that would be all the better. "I desire not [to] be identified with
any policy that ignores or repudiates social equality, and I desire to be,
where I can act freely in the matter, according to conscience and the gospel
idea—to treat the colored people as I should whites in the same circum¬
stances. ... It seems to me that unless one engaged in mission work does
feel this freedom, true effort is in a measure paralysed.”* 3

Any veteran of the antislavery movement, remembering those aboli¬
tionists who made a point of parading their fraternization with blacks
before a hostile northern public, would have recognized the problem in¬
stantly. He would have recalled how that question had plagued them
throughout their history, producing divisiveness and even sundering nu¬
merous friendships. He might have named the prominent abolitionists who
despite their zealous commitment to the cause, or because of it, scorned
social relations with Negroes as impolitic and detrimental to the objectives
for which both white and black activists fought. But for those who chose
to question such tactics, whether in the abolitionist movement or in the
freedmen’s aid movement, the implications remained absolutely clear.
Would not the measures deemed necessary to make the movement palat¬
able to a hostile public reinforce the very conditions and attitudes the
movement had initially set out to undermine? That question defied any
easy resolution in the 1860s, much as it had in antislavery circles before
the war. 84

The Gospel and the Primer

493

Having struggled through such problems in the old antislavery days,
and eager to bury the sources of divisiveness, Lewis Tappan, who had made
the transition from abolitionism to the freedmen’s aid movement, drew
upon his experience to advise prospective missionary teachers in the South.

People of color have an intuitive apprehension of the feelings of those
who profess to labor for their instruction and moral elevation. They are
quick to distinguish between affected and real zeal on their behalf, be¬
tween condescension and true regard, between outward conduct and the
emotions of the heart, and, while confiding, they are also very jealous lest
the inward should not correspond to the outward in our treatment of
them. Little things often betray the actual state of the mind. Unsympa¬
thetic, cold and selfish persons can not, with all their pretense, deceive
the instincts of those unsophisticated children of nature.

No matter how well-intended the advice, this veteran abolitionist failed to
appreciate the still larger problem that would surface again in the postwar
years and, even more forcefully, during Radical Reconstruction. For all of
its good works and sacrifices, the freedmen’s aid movement, like its anti¬
slavery predecessor, did little to reduce the dependency of blacks on white
men and women for counsel and leadership. While Tappan was sharing his
thoughts and experience with the white missionary teachers destined for
the South, Richard H. Cain, the black minister, who would soon set out on
that same pilgrimage, also drew on the past to urge that the traditional
relationship between white and black reformers be reexamined. "We know
how to serve others,” the Reverend Cain observed in early 1865, "but, have
not learned how to serve ourselves.”

We have always been directed by others in all the affairs of life: they have
furnished the thoughts while we have been passive instruments, acting
as we were acted upon, mere automatons. ... The Anti-slavery Societies,
the Abolition Societies, whose ostensible work has been to do battle for
the Negro’s elevation have never ... thought it safe for them to advance
colored men to places of trust . 85

With emancipation, such questions assumed a new and critical impor¬
tance. Few understood that more clearly than the Reverend Cain. If south¬
ern blacks needed instruction in how to act as free men and women, he
suggested, both northern and southern blacks were desperately in need of
experience "in the affairs of direction and government.” The church and
the schoolhouse seemed like ideal places in which to begin this necessary
training. "We must take into our own hands the education of our race....
Honest, dignified whites may teach ever so well, it has not the effect to exalt
the black man’s opinion of his own race, because they have always been in
the habit of seeing white men in honored positions, and respected.” Antici¬
pating by nearly half a century W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for a "talented
tenth” of educated, professional blacks whose leadership and example
would help to uplift the mass of their people, the Reverend Cain, on the eve

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BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

of his departure for Charleston, envisaged "an infusion of the intellectual
development of the Northern colored men and women” into the South.

Negro gentlemen and ladies must become teachers among them by exam¬
ple as well as by precept, teach them that though they be black, they are
as good as any other class whose skin is whiter than theirs; teach them
that complexions may differ but man is a man for all that. Finally,
colored men in the North have got to come to this doctrine, that black
men must think for themselves—act for themselves ... 86

Before the missionary societies had dispatched their first schoolmarms
to the South, and even as Union Army officers wrestled with the legal
status of the contrabands, southern blacks had taken the first steps to teach
themselves. Some of these pioneers belonged to the free Negro class, but
among the early teachers were also newly freed or escaped slaves who had
managed to acquire some rudimentary skills and now sought to share their
knowledge with the less fortunate. In Hampton, Virginia, an elderly black
who had been a slave of ex-President John Tyler opened a school in the
basement of the abandoned Tyler mansion, while in that same neighbor¬
hood Mary Peake, a free Negro who had taught clandestinely before the
war, seized the opportunity afforded by Union occupation to expand her
teaching to include the newly created class of contrabands. "Some say we
have not the same faculties and feelings with white folks,” one of her pupils
would observe. "What would the best soil produce without cultivation? We
want to get wisdom. That is all we need. Let us get that, and we are made
for time and eternity.” 87

The migration of black teachers from the North would gain headway
later in the war, most of them the agents of black churches and the freed-
men’s aid societies. Charlotte Forten, who had previously taught school in
New England and whose father had been active in the cause of black
abolitionism and civil rights, accompanied the mostly white contingent of
missionary teachers from Philadelphia to the Sea Islands of South
Carolina, where she would spend nearly two years imparting not only basic
reading and writing skills to her pupils but also an appreciation for the
achievements of their race. "Talked to the children a little while to-day
about the noble Toussaint [L’Ouverture],” she noted in her journal. "They
listened very attentively. It is well that they sh’ld know what one of their
color c’ld do for his race. I long to inspire them with courage and ambition
(of a noble sort,) and high purpose.” Perhaps more typical of the black
missionary teachers was Virginia C. Green, who came to the Wood’s planta¬
tion, on Davis Bend, Mississippi, where she set about organizing classes for
120 children. The freedmen sustained the school, four trustees chosen from

The Gospel and the Primer

495

among them controlled its operations, and in Miss Green they appear to
have found a dedicated teacher. "I class myself with the freedmen,” she
wrote a Freedman’s Bureau officer. "Though I have never known servitude
they are ... my people. Bom as far north as the lakes I have felt no freer
because so many were less fortunate.... I look forward with impatience to
the time when my people shall be strong, blest with education, purified and
made prosperous by virtue and industry. The people on the plantation
where I have labored I see tending slowly but steadily to this point.” 88

Not all the blacks who taught in the postwar South would have quali¬
fied for membership in Richard H. Cain’s projected black intellectual elite.
Fortunately for the Reverend Cain, who assumed a pastorate in Charles¬
ton, the individual who answered to the fullest his call for a talented elite
to descend upon the South chose to settle in the same city. The credentials
of Francis L. Cardozo were, indeed, impressive, exceeding those of most of
the white teachers and superintendents. A freeborn mulatto, reputedly the
son of a prominent Charleston economist and editor, Cardozo attended the
University of Glasgow (from which he graduated with distinction), studied
theology in Edinburgh and London, and returned to the United States to
serve as pastor of the Temple Street Congregational Church in New Haven,
Connecticut. Within weeks after the fall of Charleston, he resigned his
pastorate to return to his native city as the principal of a Negro school
operated under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. A
complex and ambitious person, who found it difficult to brook any criticism,
Cardozo shared with many of the white school officials a relatively low
estimation ofblack teachers—at least in their present state of preparation.
Presumably, the several blacks he employed on his own staff must have
been distinguished, since Cardozo took considerable care in the selection
and assignment of teachers and vowed to hire no blacks rather than one
who might "disgrace” the entire cause. "I have placed the educated and
experienced white Northern teachers in the highest and most responsible
positions,” he informed a northern AMA official, "and the colored ones in
the lower and less responsible ones, where they may improve by the superi¬
ority of their white fellow-laborers, and whose positions afterwards they
may be able to occupy.” When subsequently confronted by two northern
black teachers with his previously expressed preference for whites, Car¬
dozo replied that he had always insisted upon competence in his staff
members, regardless of color, and any reports to the contrary should be
squelched since "it would hurt my influence very much.” 89

No visit to postwar Charleston was thought to be complete without
calling on Cardozo and being guided through this showcase of the black
educational effort in the South. To maintain that reputation, his critics
would charge, he had begun to discriminate as carefully in the selection of
pupils as in the assignment of teachers. By his own estimate, 200 of the 438
students in November 1867 were freeborn Negroes. Earlier that year, how¬
ever, Sarah W. Stansbury, who had previously taught in Cardozo’s school,
expressed her immense relief over being transferred to a new post. "This

496

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

is more like missionary work than any I have done since coming here. The
children are all ex-slaves which is more than can be said of Mr. Cardozo’s
school—his own class and Mrs. Chippenfield’s are composed, I should judge,
entirely of freemen's children, so many of whom owned slaves before the
war." What led to her break with Cardozo, she added, was his insistence
that students who failed to pay their monthly tuition fees be sent home,
thereby making the school even more exclusive. Still another former
teacher charged that in the distribution of clothing gifts from the North,
Cardozo had favored the children of "the colored people,” who were best
able to purchase such clothing, over "the freed people,” who were by far
the most needy. "I wish to do all I can for the suffering of any class,” she
wrote in protest; "but I am not willing to labor or beg for the Tree browns,'
in a manner that will help to make the difference between them & the freed
people, even greater than it was in slavery.” Whether these various
charges were valid or not may be less important than the characteristic
way in which Cardozo dealt with them—he asked for the dismissal of both
teachers. 90

Like many of the missionary teachers and ministers, Cardozo assumed
an active role in the community, aggressively defending the rights ofblacks
and warning against the "treacherous” class of whites seeking to regain
political control of the state. Both his fame as an educator and his vigorous
advocacy of civil rights propelled him into the political arena, and in 1867
he agreed to become a candidate for the constitutional convention. The way
in which he chose to acknowledge the nomination was also characteristic.
"I have no desire for the turbulent political scene,” he wrote a friend in the
North, "but being the only educated colored man here my friends thought
it my duty to go if elected, and I consented to do so.” That position ulti¬
mately launched a political career that culminated in his election as secre¬
tary of state of South Carolina. 91

Although no doubt appreciating the talents of a Cardozo, the white
officers and superintendents of the freedmen's aid societies might have also
taken pains to note how truly exceptional he was compared to other black
teachers. That was no less than what Cardozo himself would have con¬
ceded. Even if grudgingly, however, school officials came to recognize the
strategic value of black teachers, both as examples for their people and
because they were considered less likely than northern whites to incur
"abuse and insult” in the interior counties. But in hiring black teachers,
especially those who were native to the South, school administrators some¬
times frankly confessed that they were sacrificing quality for color. The
superintendent of the freedmen's schools in Montgomery, Alabama, de¬
fended the employment of three black instructors even though they were
"inexperienced and defective in their mode of teaching.” "We use them,”
he explained, "because they are of service to our cause. It is our policy to
convert colored pupils into teachers as fast as possible. It is cheaper if not
so beneficial and it has good effects in many ways.” That explanation would
not have impressed G. L. Eberhart, the state superintendent of freedmen's

The Gospel and the Primer

497

schools in Georgia. Like Cardozo, he advised "the most exacting care” in
selecting black teachers. Unlike Cardozo, he expressed little confidence in
their potential. "I am becoming daily more impressed with their total
unfitness to assist in the moral and mental elevation of their own race. It
appears as if Slavery had completely divested them of every moral at¬
tribute—every idea that leads to true moral rectitude.” 92

When the freedmen’s aid societies and their educational representa¬
tives in the South scrutinized black candidates for teaching positions, their
concern was not limited to questions of educational background and prepa¬
ration. The experience with some black teachers made it incumbent upon
the supervisors to avoid hiring anyone who might cause divisiveness within
the harmonious "family” of teachers by agitating questions of social equal¬
ity and fraternization. No matter how well qualified, a teacher who might
be a source of controversy and embarrassment quickly outlived his or her
welcome. In Wilmington, North Carolina, a freedmen’s school official who
would soon become the state superintendent of public instruction lavished
considerable praise on one of the black women in his jurisdiction as "an
excellent teacher and a faithful Christian.” But he could neither tolerate
nor understand her adamant refusal to be boarded with a black family
rather than in the Mission House where the white teachers resided. "This
is a delicate matter and must be handled in a delicate manner,” he re¬
ported. Although anxious to hire qualified black teachers, he thought it
unwise and inexpedient for them to come to the South in the company of
white teachers or to board with white teachers.

We are charged with endeavoring to bring about a condition of social
equality between the blacks and the whites—we are charged with teach¬
ing the blacks that they have a right to demand from the whites social
equality—now, if they can point to Mission families or teachers homes
where there is complete social equality between colored and white, they
have proved, to their own satisfaction at least, their assertion. They can
say that if not in theory, we do in practice, teach social equality.

White teachers in any event could do more for the freedmen than black
instructors, since "the colored people themselves, have more confidence in
white teachers than in those of their own color.” 93

The question of where to quarter black teachers only pointed up the
larger and persistent problem of how much social fraternization to permit
and how far native white feelings and prejudices needed to be appeased. If
black teachers assigned to the South had any way of knowing what to
expect in this regard, that might have helped to ease tensions somewhat
or at least given them the opportunity to reconsider their mission. Not
until Blanche Harris and her sister had departed Oberlin for their new
teaching posts in Natchez did the school official who accompanied them
make it clear that public sentiment would not allow him to treat them in
Mississippi as he had in Ohio. Although the two young black women in this

498

BEEN IN THE STOKM SO LONG

instance preferred to board with a black family, "as we knew our influence
would be greater if we were to board with our own people,” they were asked
instead to move into the Mission House, where they would room not with
their white fellow teachers but with the domestic servants; moreover,
Blanche Harris understood that her relations with the white teachers were
to be kept at a minimum . "My room was to be my home,” she observed in
a letter protesting her treatment. Upon consulting with some of the local
bl a ^k residents, the Harris sisters resolved to rent a room in town rather
than subject themselves to the double standard practiced in the Mission
House. Before too many weeks had passed, however, they concluded that
the school officials were determined to have them teach elsewhere in the
county—or anyplace but Natchez. 94

If some black teachers found it difficult to accept distinctions in living
quarters between themselves and their white co-workers, still others came
to resent the superintendents who treated them with exaggerated praise,
but evaluated their classroom performance differently from that of their
white peers. Outright hostility could be debilitating, but too much love
from their co-workers might be equally demoralizing if it assumed the tone
of condescension. To be confined to the least important positions or to be
sent to the countryside while the choicer assignments in the cities were
reserved for the better-educated whites also proved to be sources of friction,
and some black teachers found the easy familiarity white superintendents
presumed with them grating. How much longer, asked one discouraged
black, would "our finely educated ladies” permit the same official to ad¬
dress them by their full names and title in Boston but only by their first
name in the South? Such problems may have had their antecedents in the
abolitionist movement, but few teachers took any comfort from that
thought, if they were even aware of it. Too often, it appears, the sensitivi¬
ties of black teachers were simply sacrificed to appease the sentiments of
native whites and the ambivalent racial attitudes of some missionary
educators. Whether subjected to the scowls of local citizens or to the pater¬
nal demeanor of co-workers, the black men and women who undertook the
education of their southern brethren often had to rely on the inspiration
of the classroom and the encouragement of the black community to sustain
their efforts. "Sometimes we get discouraged and think we had better
resign,” Blanche Harris confessed at one point. "And then we know that
we must suffer many things.” 95

The problems faced by the black teacher again pointed up the subservi¬
ent role blacks were often forced to play in movements designed to assist
their own people. Before the Civil War, differences over objectives, priori¬
ties, and roles, as well as growing concern over white patronization, had
driven black abolitionists into independent agitation and organization,
culminating in Martin R. Delany’s emigrationist movement and Frederick
Douglass’ break with William Lloyd Garrison. The need for black activists
to establish their own position and voice had also resulted in the National
Convention of Colored Citizens in 1864. Although ideological and tactical

The Gospel and the Primer

499

differences between black and white activists may have been less marked
when it came to educating the freedmen, the problem of how much respon¬
sibility should be assigned to blacks in that effort persisted, as did the need
to define a relationship between the largely white freedmen’s aid societies
in the North and independent black activity in the South. “We do not object
to any one coming South to teach, or superintend the education of our
colored youth,” a black editor wrote from Natchez in 1865, "but we would
like to understand how it is that these missionary teachers desire so much
to control all the school funds and property.” When local blacks raised the
money among themselves to purchase property for a school, as they did in
several communities, why should they not exercise a larger voice—even
the determining voice—in how that money was spent? Nor could this editor
understand why the missionary societies presumed to send people to the
South "who, while in the North make loud pretensions to Abolition, and
when they get in the South partake so largely of that contemptible preju¬
dice that they are ashamed to be seen in company with colored men.” 96

From the very outset, in fact, the movement to educate the freedmen
had been biracial. The entrance of Union troops into a community often
set in motion efforts among the black residents to collect sufficient funds
to build a school and hire a teacher. When the blacks in Malden, West
Virginia, the town to which Booker T. Washington and his family migrated
after emancipation, discovered that a newly arrived eighteen-year -old
black youth from Ohio knew how to read and write, they immediately hired
him as a teacher and paid him whatever they could collect among them¬
selves. In Natchez, the tuition fees collected from the pupils’ parents sus¬
tained six schools for freedmen taught by black teachers; the black
residents of Helena, Arkansas, voted to ask the Freedmen’s Bureau to tax
them for the support of schools for their children; in Nashville and Savan¬
nah, within weeks of Union occupation, blacks had organized their own
school systems. In nearly every part of the South, reports of self-sustaining
black schools suggested an impressive effort with a minimum of outside
assistance. Nor should the commendable and extensive activity of the
freedmen’s aid societies obscure the effort mounted by the black churches,
some of which preferred to establish their own schools side by side with
those maintained by the white societies. 97

What relationships these independent black efforts should enjoy with
the northern benevolent societies posed a recurring problem, and the expe¬
rience of Savannah in this regard suggested an all too familiar resolution
of the problem. When the black citizens of that city convened in the after-
math of Union occupation, they heard the Reverend James Lynch and
other dignitaries urge them to organize among themselves and develop
their own programs and courses of action. Acting on this call, they formed
the Savannah Educational Association to establish in turn a system of
schools for the freedmen which would be managed and sustained by the
community. But when the Reverend S. W. Magill, an agent of the American
Missionary Association, came to Savannah and assessed the situation, he

500

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

was appalled that neither the black board of education nor the black teach¬
ers possessed any experience in the management of schools or in teaching.
"What a field opens before the benevolent!” he informed a northern officer
of the Association. "It will not do of course to leave these people to them¬
selves. ... I fear they will be jealous & sullen if I attempt to place the
management in the hands of our white teachers. But this must be done to
make the schools effective.” Ultimately, that was accomplished, but not
until the director persuaded the black trustees to place confidence in their
white friends. "It is a great point gained that they are convinced by their
experience that they are not Sufficient of themselves.” 98

What transpired in Savannah suggested the forcefulness of a common
assumption underscoring the missionary effort in the South—that black
people emerging from the debilitating thralldom of bondage would require
for some time the counsel and direction of their white allies. Even as they
advised blacks to depend more on their own efforts and sought to inculcate
black children with the virtues of self-help and self-reliance, these same
"friends” might withhold their support or fail to encourage independent
black efforts, question the wisdom and expediency of such efforts, or oppose
them outright if they threatened to undermine their own authority. Ob¬
serving this phenomenon as early as 1864, a black critic had to wonder why
societies established for the relief and education of the freedmen, in which
blacks initially played a prominent role, invariably fell into the hands of
white managers, many of whom seemed to mistrust "the ability of colored
men to do anything without the aid of the Saxon brain.” 99

Despite the occasional setbacks and discouragement, the energy ex¬
pended by blacks to educate their children, like the simultaneous move¬
ment to worship by themselves, reflected a growing if not fully developed
sense of community and racial pride, even as it sharpened the separation
from and accentuated the differences with both their northern friends and
native whites. It was not as though blacks consciously adopted a policy of
self-imposed separation. But there did emerge a growing conviction that
full admission to white society might have to be achieved through the
development of independent and separate movements, organizations, and
institutions. This would require not only self-recognition as a people and
a community but the willingness to act on that consciousness. Neither
illiteracy nor poverty, they also came to realize, would be extinguished in
their own lifetimes, but even the poor and the illiterate in American society
—white and black—possessed certain rights and could claim protection in
the exercise of those rights. Ultimately, an elderly and illiterate freedman
suggested, education would eliminate illiteracy among his people. But in
exercising their freedom and attacking the critical problems that now beset
them, they could ill afford to depend upon "book lamin’ ” alone.

De Chaplain say we can learn to read in short time. Now dat may be so

with dem who are mo’ heady . God has not made all of us alike. Phaps

some will get an education in a little while. I knows de next generation

The Gospel and the Primer

501

will. But we’se a down trodden people. We hasn’t had no chance at all.

De most of us are slow and dull. We has bin kep down a hundred years
and I think it will take a hundred years to get us back agin. Derefo’ Mr
Chaplain, I tink we better not wait for education . 100

To define themselves as a people and to act upon their grievances,
blacks in every one of the ex-Confederate states would begin to organize at
some level. Freedmen and freeborn alike, the educated and the illiterate,
preachers and field hands, teachers and artisans gathered together after
church services, in the new schoolhouses, in town meetings, and in county
and state conventions to discuss their condition and to frame a response.
Previously barred by law, such meetings now took on additional signifi¬
cance as they set the stage for the entrance of freedmen into the political
arena and for the fullest expression of their new status as black citizens.

Chapter Ten

BECOMING A PEOPLE

We feel to bee a people.

—A. H. HAINES,

BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA, OCTOBER 19, 1865 1

We want representative men, without regard to color, as long as they
carry the brand of negro oppression. We need power and intellectual
equality with the whites. It does not matter whether he be a pretty or ugly
negro; a black negro or a mulatto. Whether he were a slave or a free negro;
the question is, is he a negro at all?... We want power; it only comes
through organization, and organization comes through unity. Our efforts
must be one and inseparable, blended, tied, and bound together.

—HENRY MCNEAL TURNER,

AUGUSTA, GEORGIA, JANUARY 4, 1866*

T he scene had no real precedents. Seeking to underscore that fact,
a white reporter thought it nothing less than "the great sensation of
the day” and a harbinger of "great and dreaded innovations.” On Septem¬
ber 29,1865, more than 115 black men, most of them only recently slaves,
filed into the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Raleigh, North
Carolina, designated themselves a Convention of Freedmen, and elected a
northem-bom black minister who had never experienced slavery to pre¬
side over their deliberations. They had come together from all parts of the
state, chosen in some fashion by their people and instructed by them to find
ways to eradicate the legal inequities of the past that still circumscribed
their new freedom. Meanwhile, several blocks from this site, the same
number of white men, some of them former slaveholders, assembled in a
legislative chamber to frame a civil government for North Carolina and to
determine what they could preserve of a seemingly shattered past.

The dramatic contrasts in the meeting halls and purposes of these two
conventions extended as well to the political and economic power whites
and blacks wielded and to the occupations, class biases, attire, and formal
education of the respective bodies. The distinctions in native intelligence
and capacity for self-government were less discernible. Although the dele¬
gates to the Constitutional Convention were more literate, how they used

Becoming a People

503

their accumulated intelligence in the next six days of deliberations made
that advantage less than obvious. If some of them retained charitable
feelings for the former slave, in the belief that he bore no responsibility for
his freedom, that did not mean they would entertain any foolish notions
about his right to participate in the political life of the state.

Located in a back street of Raleigh, the church in which the Freed-
men’s Convention assembled was a modest wooden structure, scantily fur¬
nished, able to accommodate about 300 persons on the floor and another
100 in the gallery. During the four days of the convention, every seat would
be filled with delegates and interested spectators, most of them also black.
Affixed to the wall directly behind the pulpit, a lifelike bust of the martyred
Abraham Lincoln remained shrouded in mourning more than five months
after his assassination, and the inscription overhead repeated the classic
words of his last inaugural address: "With malice toward none, with
charity for all, with firmness in the right.” That proved to be the spirit of
this unique gathering. Several of the delegates, however, among them
Abraham H. Galloway, a light-skinned man whose black mother had been
a slave of the distinguished Galloway family, would have preferred less
charity, more firmness, and at least a suggestion of malice if charity and
firmness yielded no results. Whatever might have been Galloway’s blood
ties to the aristocratic clan whose name he bore, he harbored no affection
for his former owners. Having escaped to Ohio in 1857, where he became
an ardent abolitionist, Galloway returned to his native state after the war
exuding what one observer called an "exceedingly radical and Jacobinical
spirit.” At this Raleigh gathering, he would agree to compromise his ad¬
vocacy of immediate and universal manhood suffrage only if an educa¬
tional test for voting was applied equally to both races. But he thought it
unlikely that white North Carolinians would wish to disfranchise more
th ar half of their eligible voters. And he refused to believe the threats of
leading whites to exile themselves if blacks won political equality. "It
wouldn’t be six months,” he thought, "before they would be putting their
arms around our necks and begging us to vote [for] them for office.”

Although Galloway called the Raleigh convention to order, the domi¬
nant mood was quickly established by the man the delegates chose as their
permanent chairman—James W. Hood. Born in Pennsylvania, Hood had
been a minister in Bridgeport, Connecticut, before coming South in 1864
as a missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The
election of a northern-born black to preside over a gathering of ex-slaves
did not go unchallenged. "I myself am an adopted citizen of the State,”
Hood said in his defense, "having lived here for some two years, and if I
am not a citizen here, I am not a citizen of any State.” Upon hearing that
some delegates were displeased with his election, he offered to resign, but
the convention would not hear of it. In his opening address, Hood implored
the delegates to refrain from "harsh language” and recrimination. "I say
that we and the white people have to live here together.... We have been
living together for a hundred years and more, and we have got to live

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together still; and the best way is to harmonize our feelings as much as
possible, and to treat all men respectfully. Respectability will always gain
respect ..

Voicing a similar moderation, James H. Harris, a native of North
Carolina, emerged as the most influential figure of this and subsequent
gatherings. Although born a slave, he had obtained his freedom in 1850 (his
certificate of freedom described him as a nineteen-year-old "dark mulatoe”
with a scar upon his head), migrated to Ohio, where he received some
formal education, visited Liberia and Sierra Leone to observe the Afro-
American settlements there, and returned to the United States in 1863 to
help recruit blacks for military service. Two years later, as a delegate from
Raleigh to the Freedmen’s Convention, he shared with his new colleagues
the results of his varied experiences. He had met enough northern whites,
he told them, to know that the "intelligent white class in the South”
remained the "best friends” of colored people. He had seen enough of the
North to know the depth of racial animosities in that region, manifested
in the exclusion of blacks from most non-menial employments and in war¬
time riots that ranked among the most "diabolical and murderous” exhibi¬
tions of racial hatred in history. He had come to recognize, too, that only
the law of military necessity, not a benevolent crusade of the Union Army,
had freed his people. Finally, his travels elsewhere in the world—"40,000
miles in search of a better country”—had convinced him that neither
Africa nor the West Indies were places of asylum for American blacks. The
freedmen’s place was here on southern soil, and the only way to win the
confidence of white men was to work faithfully and show "a patient and
respectful demeanor.” This was no time for recrimination, nor was this
the proper moment for radical manifestos. If the present tensions and ill
feeling were only permitted to subside, the freedmen would surely
"receive what they had a right to claim.” After all, he suggested, God was
on their side, and he envisioned "a glorious future” for the black race in
the South.

Like many of the postwar black conventions, the Raleigh conclave
came to be dominated by those who thought it more expedient to request
than to demand and who preferred to take their stand on the more abstract
and less controversial principle of equality before the law rather than
immediate admission to all political privileges. The effect of speeches such
as those of Hood and Harris not only blunted the radicalism symbolized by
Galloway but did much, said one relieved reporter, to disabuse the minds
of fearful whites about the intent of these unprecedented and only recently
prohibited meetings. Nevertheless, the delegates sometimes took a position
at variance with this deliberately cultivated tone of moderation. The reso¬
lution revering the memory of John Brown would hardly have endeared
them to the great mass of southern whites. Nor would native whites have
appreciated the resolution praising the efforts of "that portion of the Re¬
publican party of which Messrs. Chase and Sumner and Stevens and Gree¬
ley are the heads” to secure blacks their rights through congressional

Becoming a People

505

action. And even as James Hood made his plea for conciliation, he rejected
any return to the old days of subserviency, declared that blacks had waited
long enough for their rights, and scoffed at the notion that they were
unprepared to exercise those rights.

People used to say it was not the time to abolish slavery, and used to tell
us to wait until the proper time arrived; but it would only seem reason¬
able that the more slaves there were, the more difficult it would be to set
them free. The best way is to give the colored man rights at once, and
then they will practice them and the sooner know how to use them.

Nor did he hesitate to enumerate the rights which properly belonged to
black people, as much as to their white fellow citizens.

First, the right to testify in courts of justice, in order that we may defend
our property and our rights. Secondly, representation in the jury box. It
is the right of every man accused of any offence, to be tried by a jury of
his peers.... Thirdly and finally, the black man should have the right to
carry his ballot to the ballot box. These are the rights that we want—that
we will contend for—and that, by the help of God, we will have, God being
our defender.

That could hardly have been clearer. But the Appeals, Addresses, and
Petitions adopted by the convention, and intended largely for white audi¬
ences, often failed to reflect the aggressive spirit with which individual
bla ck s pressed their demands in speeches intended for their fellow dele¬
gates and the black spectators. With the Constitutional Convention meet¬
ing nearby, the Freedmen’s Convention drew up an Address to that body
which was the very model of circumspection—"moderate in tone, a white
reporter wrote of it, and "unexceptionable in its phraseology and de¬
mands.” Avoiding the issues of testimony in the courts, representation on
juries, and suffrage, the Address acknowledged instead the powerlessness
of the freedmen, their dependence upon "moral appeals to the hearts and
consciences of the people,” and their confidence in the "justice, wisdom,
and patriotism” of the Constitutional Convention. Surely, that body would
protect the interests of "all classes,” including a people who were now
"helpless” after 250 years of slavery, who had been raised in intimate
association with the dominant race, and who in the Civil War had "re¬
mained throughout obedient and passive.” Although they had no wish to
return to slavery, they chose to emphasize the positive side of that sense
of mutual obligations which had bound the masters and the slaves to¬
gether. Rather than look to the North for protection and sympathy, they
preferred to win their rights by "industry, sobriety and respectful de¬
meanor.” But whites needed to reciprocate this commitment by compensat¬
ing them properly for their labor, by respecting the sanctity of their family
relations, by providing for the education of their children, and by abolish-

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ing "oppressive laws” which made racial distinctions. "Is this asking too
much?” the Address concluded.

The moderate tone of their appeals, the conspicuous omissions, the
humble posture were all consistent with the conciliatory spirit that domi¬
nated the convention. The Raleigh newspapers, as did several northern
reporters who were present, quickly lauded the Address as a product of
good sense—"a wonderfully conservative document, undisfigured by the
marks of levelling radicalism.” Under the circumstances, the Constitu¬
tional Convention treated the Address with courtesy, while failing to act
on the issues it raised. Like the "respect” and "confidence” which blacks
accorded that body, the "courtesy” with which the whites responded
seemed like so much playacting, with each side recognizing the inevitabil¬
ity of a prolonged struggle between them. Outside of the convention hall,
the white delegates breathed precisely that spirit. "The niggers are having
a convention, a’n’t they?” one delegate asked a northern reporter. "What
do they want? Equal rights, I suppose. How do they talk, anyhow? Going
to vote, be they?” When informed that the blacks had been quite moderate
in their speeches and that their principal demand had been the right to
testify in the courts, the delegate quickly replied, "No, sir; they won’t get
that. It wouldn’t do at all. No, sir.... The people won’t have niggers giving
evidence. They’ll never get that. The people won’t have it.”

The tactics of accommodation failed to yield the expected concessions.
If anything, the state’s white leadership might have been encouraged to
think they could return to the antebellum racial code with a minimum of
resistance. Fortunately, the Freedmen’s Convention had not left every¬
thing to the white man’s sense of fair play. Before dispersing, the delegates
agreed to organize a state Equal Rights League, instructed that organiza¬
tion to press for the repeal of all discriminatory laws, and proposed cooper¬
ation with any national group which might be formed with similar
objectives. When the National Equal Rights League convened less than a
month later in Cleveland, Ohio, James Harris was there to represent North
Carolina. Alluding to his extensive travels, Harris declared on this occasion
that he had found that "white men are white men” the world over. 3

Less than a year after the Freedmen’s Convention, blacks again gath¬
ered in the AME Church in Raleigh for a statewide meeting, but this time
the rhetoric, the resolutions, and the appeals took on a more aggressive
tone, as if to suggest that a year of "moderation” and "conciliation” had
been sufficient time to test white intentions and intransigence. This timo
too, the delegates recited their grievances with far more openness and with
an obvious impatience: "In the counties of Jones, Duplin, Craven, Hyde,
Halifax, and many others in this State, outrages are committed, such as
killing, shooting and robbing the unprotected people for the most trifling
offences, and, in frequent instances, for no offence at all.” The perpetrators
of this violence, the convention declared, were permitted to roam freely
without any arrest for their crimes. Rather than appeal to the state legisla¬
ture for a redress of grievances, the delegates expressed their "profound

Becoming a People

507

gratitude” for the recent actions of Congress, particularly the Freedmen’s
Bureau bill, the Civil Rights bill, and the proposed Fourteenth Amend¬
ment. They denounced taxation without representation as "in direct viola¬
tion of the sacred rights of American citizens.” And they urged blacks in
every county, district, and village to organize branches of the Equal Rights
League, so that the Federal government and the entire world would learn
of the cruelties to which the freed slaves were being subjected. 4

On January 14, 1868, delegates poured into Raleigh for still another
Constitutional Convention to draft a new government and document for
the state. But this body differed strikingly from its predecessor, both in
spirit and in composition. This time blacks were not meeting separately
several blocks away, drawing up "moral appeals” to the white conscience;
instead, fifteen black delegates, duly elected by the eligible voters of the
state, took their seats with the white delegates and prepared to participate
fully in the deliberations. Presumably, the grievances and demands of the
freed slaves would be reflected in the final results of the convention. Among
others, James H. Harris, James W. Hood, and Abraham H. Galloway were
on hand to make certain.

The freedmen’s conventions marked the political debut of southern
blacks. What made them so unprecedented was that men who had only
recently been slaves, along with freeborn blacks, were expressing them¬
selves in ways that had only recently been banned, gathering together for
the first time, exchanging experiences, discussing the problems they faced
in their particular counties, and sharing visions of a new South and a
"redeemed” race. The scenes acted out in Raleigh were being duplicated in
Mobile, Charleston, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Alexandria, Augusta, Nash¬
ville, Lexington, and Little Rock. Within a year after Appomattox, in
nearly every ex-Confederate state, the local political activity which had
begun with Federal occupation and the rallies celebrating emancipation
culminated in the election of delegates to statewide conventions. And out
of these gatherings would emerge a black leadership that would soon be
called upon to help in the task of political reconstruction.

Perhaps as important as the conventions themselves was the local
political activity that preceded them and the initial politicization of large
numbers of blacks, both in the urban centers and in the countryside. Typi¬
cal of such activity, the blacks of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, met
in Tarboro to elect delegates to the state convention; they also took up a
collection to defray the expenses of the trip to Raleigh and instructed the
delegates on the most pressing concerns in their respective locales. The
election of delegates might reveal as much about prevailing sentiments as
the resolutions these local meetings passed. In Thomasville, Georgia, for

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example, blacks met in a grove near the edge of town and elected the
Reverend Jared Wade, a literate clergyman and teacher, over Giles Price,
an educated and fairly affluent blacksmith who had been free before the
war and who had apparently offended some of his people by the generous
and conspicuous support he had given the Confederacy. 5

Where the election of delegates in mass meetings proved to be impossi¬
ble or too dangerous, they were apt to be chosen after church services, by
informal gatherings, or by clandestine neighborhood conferences. Even so,
the cost and difficulty of travel to the state conventions kept some elected
delegates away, while others might refuse to attend unless promised Fed¬
eral protection when they returned to their homes. The absence of troops
or of Federal officials had a way of reducing representation from the back-
country or up-country counties, as in Louisiana and South Carolina. Ignor¬
ing the advice of local whites and threats to their lives and jobs, some
delegates came to the state meetings at considerable personal and eco¬
nomic risk; others made a point of leaving during the night and returning
with the least amount of notice, while some never returned after the local
newspaper noted their presence at the convention. Isham Swett, a self-
educated former slave and a barber in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at¬
tended the state conclave in Raleigh as a delegate. When the news became
known, his white customers immediately withdrew their patronage. After
attending the state convention in Macon, Georgia, several delegates re¬
mained in that city rather than return to their homes, fearing the strong
stand they had taken on equal suffrage and civil rights would expose them
instantly to roving white gangs. During the Convention of the Colored
People of Virginia, Peter K. Jones, a delegate from Petersburg, asked,
"Why are not more of you here?” and then suggested the answer: "Some
of our people have been paid to stay away by our former masters. They told
us that coming here would hurt us at home.” At the same convention, a
delegate from Williamsburg recited the difficulties in securing representa¬
tion from his region, with former slaveholders doing everything in their
power to prevent elected delegates from attending. 8

Despite the absentees, most of the statewide conventions brought to¬
gether a remarkable cross section of the black population. The sharp con¬
trasts in attire, complexion, and demeanor, and the equally apparent
differences in background and education, again impressed outside ob¬
servers with the uniqueness of these assemblages. There were black sol¬
diers in uniform, and nearly every convention recognized their symbolic
importance by appointing at least one of them to some official position.
Ministers appeared in substantial numbers, some of them dressed in black
broadcloth and several of them only recently chaplains in the black regi-
ments. If lawyers, farmers, and planters dominated the white constitu¬
tional conventions, clergymen, teachers, carpenters, mechanics, hotel
waiters, barbers, household servants (including the former body servant of
Jefferson Davis), and plantation hands made up the bulk of the black
conventions. In Louisiana, where the freeborn mulattoes of New Orleans

Becoming a People

509

had met frequently since Federal occupation, the Convention of Colored
Men that assembled in January 1865 was the first time delegates from the
country parishes had participated, and that scene elicited a special com¬
ment from a black editor:

There were seated side by side the rich and the poor, the literate and
educated man, and the country laborer, hardly released from bondage,
distinguished only by the natural gifts of the mind. There, the rich land-
owner, the opulent tradesman, seconded motions offered by humble me¬
chanics and freedmen. Ministers of the gospel, officers and soldiers of the
U.S. army, men who handle the sword or the pen, merchants and clerks,
—all the classes of society were represented, and united in a common
thought: the actual liberation from social and political bondage. It was
a great spectacle, and one which will be remembered for generations to
come . 7

The leadership that emerged at the freedmen’s conventions gained
valuable experience for the roles many of them would subsequently play
in Radical Reconstruction. Among the delegates to the state convention
that assembled in Charleston in November 1865, for example, were a fu¬
ture lieutenant governor, state supreme court justice, and secretary of
state of South Carolina, as well as several men destined to serve in the
legislature and the United States Congress. The quality of black leader
ship, in South Carolina and elsewhere, immediately impressed outside
observers, even skeptical native whites who had found the concept ofblacks
in such roles as either distasteful or incomprehensible. What remained
open to question, however, was whether or not a leader commanded a
significant following and constituency or was simply a self-appointed
spokesman whose claims rested on his education, occupation, or northern
origins. That was never an easy question to answer, though clergymen, who
were in the most advantageous position to gather a following around them,
tended to dominate postwar black political life.

In the early stages of organizational activity, especially in places like
Charleston and New Orleans, the old free black communities contributed
a disproportionate share of the leadership. But that dominance did not
necessarily endure, particularly as some freed slaves quickly acquired an
education and began to accumulate property. "It is remarkable,” thought
Richard H. Cain, who had come to Charleston in 1865, that the former
leading men in these parts, those whom we would have recognized as the
great minds of the South among the colored people, have relapsed into
secondary men; and the class who were hardly known, have come forward
and assumed a bold front, and are asserting their manhood.” In some
states, moreover, as in Mississippi, blacks who had been free before the war
were considered too dependent on whites to be entrusted with positions of
leadership. 8

Equally important in the early stages of political organization were

510

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

northern blacks, most of them missionaries and teachers, who came to the
South during and after the war, in some instances returning to a native
land from which they had become exiles. Henry M. Turner, a freeborn
South Carolinian who had already distinguished himself as an army chap¬
lain and AME organizer, opened the Freedmen’s Convention in Georgia in
1866 and shared political leadership in that state with Tunis G. Campbell,
a Massachusetts-born black and Freedmen’s Bureau agent who had estab¬
lished a virtually independent governnment in the Georgia Sea Islands.
Richard H. Cain (a native of Virginia) and Francis L. Cardozo (a native of
South Carolina), both of them ministers in Connecticut during the war,
came to South Carolina in time to participate in the early convention
movement, thereby joining an illustrious group that also included, as re¬
cent arrivals from the North, Martin R. Delany (a native of Virginia) and
Jonathan J. Wright (a native of Pennsylvania), both of whom served for a
time as Freedmen’s Bureau agents. 9

But the bulk of the delegates to the conventions were themselves
freedmen who came out of the virtual anonymity of slavery to participate
in the political life of their localities and states. Some of them were house
servants and artisans who had acquired a rudimentary education and a
degree of acculturation to white values; still others had spent their bondage
in the fields and quarters, having little contact with whites except for the
owner and overseer. For many of the freedmen, whatever their varied
experiences in slavery, military service, had exposed them for the first time
to the outside world and helped to accelerate the transition from bondage
to political activism and leadership. In South Carolina, Robert Smalls
managed to construct a loyal constituency in the Sea Islands on the basis
of his wartime exploits, as did Prince Rivers, a former coachman in Beau¬
fort and a sergeant in the Union Army, who had impressed Colonel Higgin-
son as a man "of apparently inexhaustible strength and activity” with
extraordinary leadership powers. "He makes Toussaint perfectly intelligi¬
ble; and if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will
be its king.” 10

Not many of the freedmen in the black conventions initially assumed
leadership roles. More often, the ministers, as the most educated and ar¬
ticulate members, effectively controlled the proceedings by displaying their
oratorical talents and their political knowledge and, if necessary, by ma¬
nipulating the finer points of parliamentary procedure with which most of
the delegates were unfamiliar. But even if many of the ex-slaves "sat mute
on the benches,” as one observer described them, the delegates who most
underscored the remarkable character of these conventions were those
who came dressed in the cheapest homespun clothes, who could neither
read nor write, whose faces and bodies still bore the marks of their recent
bondage, and who spoke a language, said one reporter, "that no northern
white man can understand.” The only comparable assemblages in their
experience had been for religious purposes, and if they spoke at all during
the proceedings they might on occasion approximate in their gestures,

Becoming a People 511

shouts, and singsong oratory the rural prayer meetings they knew so inti¬
mately. 11

When the ex-slave delegates pressed their grievances before the con¬
ventions, they lacked the style, the propensity for intellectual abstractions,
and the ability to embellish their points with literary and biblical refer¬
ences that characterized, sometimes all too ostentatiously, their ministe¬
rial colleagues. But they spoke from their own individual experiences. "My
dear brothers,” one of them declared, "I don’t place myself in this honora¬
ble convention as a Henry Clay or a Webster, fur I know I kin not do it,
nor to speak afore you. I know Fs a poor, destituted, onlarnt don’t-know-A-
from-B. Fs been rocked in a hard cradle, from my youth up to the present
age.” Occasionally, they would rise to familiarize the delegates with condi¬
tions in their respective counties; some of them lost their patience al¬
together and scolded their more experienced colleagues for wasting
precious time in parliamentary wrangling and trivialities and urged them
to get on with the more pressing issues of freedom from economic oppres¬
sion and the two-faced judicial system—issues that they confronted in their
daily lives. Whatever their limitations in education and vocabulary, they
often projected a wisdom that few of the wordy ministers and northern-
educated delegates could surpass. "There is an eloquence in experience,”
one black reporter wrote after hearing an ex-slave relate the problems his
people confronted, "which can never be had elsewhere; no, not even by the
most polished culture of the schools.” And if the white newspapers chose
to dwell upon the ungrammatical utterances and plantation speech of some
delegates, and mock their pretensions to oratory, several of the more liter¬
ate blacks who were present saw no reason to be embarrassed. "I hope the
reporters will take me down as saying 'dis/ 'dat/ 'de oder,’ and the 'deformi¬
ties of de constitution/ ” James D. Lynch told the State Convention of the
Colored People of Tennessee. "I know more of syntax than all of them put
together.” Nor would he tolerate the demeaning ways in which whites
addressed black people, both the ex-slaves and the freeborn, outside the
convention hall. "A white man said to me this morning, 'Well, Uncle, how
are you getting along?’ I was glad to know that I had a white nephew.” 12

That these were conventions of black people, called and managed and
financed by black people, was a source of considerable pride. Although
whites (usually Freedmen’s Bureau officers) were invited to address them,
and dignitaries (like Horace Greeley) sent messages replete with moral
injunctions, the delegates wished to make clear that they were not the
dupes of white men. A delegate to the Virginia freedmen’s convention
proudly asserted that the Appeal to the American People, which had just
been read aloud, was "the production of our own people, and not the work
of our northern friends.” He knew the charge would be made and he
wanted to forestall it. The point would have to be made more than once,
that having been controlled and manipulated as slaves, they had no desire
to perpetuate that relationship in freedom, even with whites who claimed
to be their liberators. After all, some would argue, the underlying purpose

512

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

of these meetings was to show the world that black people, most of them
only recently slaves, were perfectly capable of coming together to disAnga
and act upon the critical issues of the day. In New Orleans, after a Federal
official criticized the actions of a recent colored convention, the Tribune
lashed out at his presumptuousness. "He seemed unwilling to understand
that the Convention felt as colored men feel, while Mr. Conway could only
feel as a white man feels.... We need no apprenticeship to take the place
of slavery, no social minors, no political children.” 13

To proclaim their independence of white influence did not always
make it so. Actually, the question of what relations they should sustain
with their white friends remained an ongoing source of divisiveness within
the ranks of black leadership. The matter came to a head at the Freedmen’s
Convention of Georgia in early 1866 when a majority committee report
nominated a white Freedmen’s Bureau official as president of the newly
formed Georgia Equal Rights Association, while a minority report nomi¬
nated a black clergyman. After some debate, the delegates elected the
white man, who proceeded to commend them for the wisdom they had
exercised in choosing your President from among your white friends. ” But
in Mobile, Alabama, when a black meeting considered a proposal to make
a white man the editor of their newspaper, at least one participant strongly
dissented. Such an appointment, he argued, would acknowledge that blacks
still needed whites to act and think for them. "There is none but colored
men that can truly sympathize with their race! None but those who have
been subjected to the degrading influence of slavery that can truthfully lay
our grievances before the world and claim its sympathy!” 14

Since their white friends from the North were thought to be nearer to
the sources of power, some blacks thought it in their best interests to
cultivate close relationships, even at the risk of compromising their own
independence. Still others deferred to them as men of experience and
education who were in advantageous positions, whether as Freedmen’s
Bureau agents or the representatives of benevolent societies, to render
them immediate relief and assistance. But in those places where a black
leadership quickly emerged in the aftermath of the war, impatience with
white dictation and advice manifested itself from the very outset. Not
surprisingly, the New Orleans Tribune voiced the strongest opinions on
this question. Without intending any disrespect for "our white friends,”
and while appreciating "the disinterestedness, the courage, the sound
sense and the fraternal feeling they have displayed during their long cru¬
sade in behalf of liberty,” the newspaper insisted that black people mat-a
their own policies, decide on priorities, and select leaders from among
themselves. "Who can better know our interest than we do? Who is more
competent to discern what is good for us than we are?” How blacks an¬
swered those questions went to the very heart of their freedom, and the
Tribune thought their white friends could best demonstrate their friend¬
ship by immediately conceding that fact.

Becoming a People

513

If we are men—as our friends contend we are—we are able to attend to
our own business. There is no man in the world so perfectly identified
with our own interest as to understand it better than we do ourselves. We
listen respectfully to the addresses of our white friends; but we must
deliberate and decide for ourselves.... We need friends, it is true; but we
do not need tutors. The age of guardianship is past forever. We now think
for ourselves, and we shall act for ourselves. 15

Although blacks demonstrated a healthy skepticism about how much
reliance they should place on their white friends, they were not always
agreed on the amount of confidence they could place in themselves and in
their own leaders and movements. With the critical problems they faced,
and the need to project an image of harmony and responsibility to a skepti¬
cal white America, blacks could ill afford the factional struggles, acrimoni¬
ous debates, and conflicts of personal ambition that pitted the dark-skinned
against the light-skinned, the ex-slave against the freeborn, the native
against the northern-born. No matter how often black leaders, newspapers,
and meetings called for unity, the advent of freedom had a way of exacer¬
bating old differences and introducing new divisions. During the Conven¬
tion of the Freedmen of North Carolina, for example, one delegate could
not restrain himself after a light-skinned Negro had criticized him for
daring to oppose the northern-born black they had chosen for chairman.
"I didn’t come here,” he shouted, "and no other man of this convention
didn’t come here, sir, to have the whip of slavery cracked over us by no
slaveholder’s son.” With similar disdain, some blacks who had been free
before the war resented being called "freedmen” and tried in every way to
dissociate themselves from the former slaves. 16

The sources of such divisiveness were familiar enough, reflecting as
they did deeply rooted distinctions not only of color but of class, education,
income, occupation, and acculturation to white society. Aside from being
more literate and affluent than the ex-slaves, the mulattoes and free
Negroes who made up the colored elites in cities like New Orleans, Charles¬
ton, and Washington, D.C., tended to lead a separate social life, married
within their group, attended different churches, and preferred to send their
children to private schools rather than to the newly established freedmen’s
schools. The Brown Fellowship Society of Charleston, which admitted only
well-to-do mulattoes, and the Lotus Club of Washington, D.C., which ex¬
cluded freedmen, exemplified the more extreme manifestations of this
caste consciousness. Even the haughtiest house servants of Charleston and
Washington, D.C., while thinking themselves superior to the "country nig¬
gers” who flocked to their cities after the war, might have been barred from
"colored society” unless they possessed the necessary ancestral creden¬
tials. 17

Having experienced the hostility of freeborn blacks, a newly freed
slave found difficulty in making any sense out of it. "The free fellows felt
themselves better than the slave, because of the fact, I suppose, that they

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were called free, while in reality they were no more free than the slave,
until the war set both classes free.” The problem he described became
particularly acute in Washington, D.C., where upwards of 40,000 emanci¬
pated slaves from Virginia and Maryland confirmed the worst fears of
inundation. Many of those who made up the old free Negro class, which had
numbered less than 10,000 in 1860, reacted by withdrawing into their own
social orbit, as if to draw a boundary between themselves and the "contra¬
bands.” John E. Bruce, an ex-slave who migrated to Washington with his
mother during the war, would some years later pen a caustic commentary
on the "fust families” that composed the colored elite of the nation’s capi¬
tal. The older citizens, he noted, manifested an exclusiveness that often
bordered on the ludicrous. With an insatiable "love of display” and a
frequently proclaimed pride in their ancestry ("forever and ever informing
the uninitiated what a narrow escape they had from being bom white”),
they tried to assume the airs and manners of colored aristocrats "and
wouldn’t be caught dead with an ordinary Negro.” If they lacked the means
to live as aristocrats, they made up for it by their recollections of previous
service to white dignitaries. "He has seen Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Ben
Wade and Joshua R. Giddings. He used to shave these great luminaries,
which is the only consolation that the memories of departed days can now
give him.” 18

Whether based on color or previous status, the distinctions separating
blacks seldom assumed such importance outside of the few large urban
centers. To make too much of the pretentiousness exhibited by members
of these small elites would be to overlook the degree to which most mu-
lattoes, free Negroes, and former slaves had always worked and lived to¬
gether, sharing a common condition and plight and generally too
preoccupied with survival and a hostile white society to cultivate any caste
pretensions. When imposing restrictions and reinforcing racial segrega¬
tion, moreover, whites would pay no attention to gradations of color or to
the previous status of blacks. What a northern-born black leader observed
of white attitudes in 1876 was no less true ten years earlier: "They call
everybody a negro that is as black as the ace of spades or as white as snow,
if they think he is a negro or know that he has negro blood in his veins.” 19

The sources of divisiveness persisted among blacks, and internal strife
would occasionally surface and weaken their movements. But the common
hostility they confronted usually forced the various groups that made up
the black community to minimize and surmount their differences. Even in
the large cities, the colored elites came to understand the futility of divorc¬
ing their cause from that of the mass of freedmen. "They must stand or fall
together,” the New Orleans Tribune proclaimed, and this mulatto organ
consistently urged unity between the freemen and the freedmen. 20 Not
simply the experience of a common oppression united them but the convic¬
tion thai they could overcome it together. The black convention movement,
as a vehicle for this unity, would play a major role in defining a common
future.

With the end of the war, black hopes and expectations seemed almost
boundless. "Never was there a brighter prospect before any people,” Rich¬
ard H. Cain wrote from South Carolina, "than that presented to the colored
people of the Southern states.” 21 To take a conciliatory approach toward
the former ruling class, now reeling under its wartime losses but still
possessing considerable economic power, appeared to make sound political
sense. If they could only share the future with whites, as equal participants
in the body politic, black spokesmen vowed they would keep the peace,
harbor no ill feelings or recriminations about the past, and no longer feel
the need to look to the North for protection and sympathy. That hope
(and implied threat if it were not realized) underlay much of the moder¬
ation that characterized the early postwar political activity of southern
blacks.

Exulting in their freedom, but perceiving at the same time their pow¬
erlessness and vulnerability, the black conventions framed their addresses
and manifestos for consideration by the state constitutional conventions
and legislatures. Invariably, they appealed to the "wisdom, sense of justice,
and magnanimous generosity” they expected from those bodies and which
they professed to find in the hearts and minds of the white South. The pose
they struck of a long-suffering but patient people seemed best calculated
to win the approval of their white countrymen, many of whom had only
recently come to know the true meaning of suffering, the separation of
families, and defeat. The Convention of Colored People that gathered in
Charleston in late 1865 grounded its appeal to "the White Inhabitants of
South Carolina” in precisely that spirit:

We have not come together in battle array to assume a boastful attitude
and to talk loudly of high-sounding principles, or of unmeaning plati¬
tudes; nor do we pretend to any great boldness; for we remember your
former wealth and greatness, and we know our poverty and weakness;
and although we feel keenly our wrongs, still we come together, we trust,
in a spirit of meekness and of patriotic good-will toward all the people of
the State. 22

To emphasize the mutuality of interest upon which a new South would
rise, blacks attending the freedmen’s conventions dwelled upon their own
southern roots and how their lives, experiences, and destinies were inter¬
woven with those of white Southerners. That kind of appeal would hope¬
fully not only allay white apprehensions but lay to rest any new
speculation about blacks expatriating themselves to some distant land. The
South was their homeland, not Africa, not Central America, not even
the northern United States, and they fully intended to make their homes

516

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

in the regions they knew intimately and in which they had been bom and
reared along with their fellow whites.

The dust of our fathers mingle with yours in the same grave yards; you
have transmitted into our veins much of the rich blood which course
through yours; we talk the same language, and worship the same God;
our mothers have nursed you, and satisfied your hunger with our pap; our
association with you have taught us to revere you. This is your country,
but it is ours too; you were bom here, so were we; your fathers fought for
it, but our fathers fed them. 23

To underscore their regional roots and loyalties, black spokesmen also
thought this an appropriate time to remind white Southerners of how the
slaves had remained peaceful and faithful "while your greatest trials were
upon you” and when any rebellious behavior might have plunged the South
into an even more costly bloodbath. Nearly every black convention re¬
peated some variant of this theme, as if to suggest that their wartime
conduct provided ample evidence not only of their essentially peaceful
nature but of their ability to function responsibly under the most trying
conditions.

No race ever served a people more faithfully than we have served them
who were our masters. When they were carrying on a war, the object of
which was, to rivet our bonds still more firmly, and to mab slavery
perpetual, we at home conducted ourselves peaceably. We not only pro¬
tected their wives and children, but tilled their fields and fed their ar¬
mies. Did we, at any time rise against their helpless families, did we ever
offer them insult of any kin d? 24

Actually, as both whites and blacks knew, the answers to those questions
depended on individual experiences. The wartime record of slave behavior
had been far more varied and complex, and the fidelity of blacks had often
been fragile and fragmented. But for altogether different reasons, blacks
and whites in the postwar years chose to ignore the wartime black Judases,
the runaways, and the looters in favor of those who had stood by the side
of their "white folks.” Even as blacks recited their wartime loyalty, how¬
ever, they claimed not to have been "indifferent spectators” to a war involv¬
ing their very freedom and that their faithfulness suggested forbearance
and Providential guidance rather than contentment with their condition.
Seeking to explain their "docility and obedience,” and their failure to
avenge themselves on their oppressors during the Civil War, a statewide
convention of Virginia blacks professed to see "the hand of an all-wise God,
who has seen fit to hold the passions of His African children until He saw
fit to stir the passions of the two sections of the country—that both North
and South should suffer for the sin of slavery.” 25

Even the most effusive promises of continued loyalty and fai th filing
were conditioned on whites responding in kind—that is, with good works

Becoming a People

517

that were commensurate with black expressions of good faith. While Ala¬
bama blacks acknowledged the affections they felt for those "among whom
our lot is cast,” they cautioned whites not to misinterpret those feelings as
a willingness to forfeit or postpone "the rights of our common manhood.”
Similarly, the freedmen of Robeson County, North Carolina, were not nec¬
essarily averse to the conciliatory spirit that characterized the Freedmen’s
Convention of 1865, but they expected local whites to reciprocate by ceas¬
ing to beat them, drive them from their homes, and cheat them of their
wages. Pending such developments, they promised to retain their skepti¬
cism about those native whites who were suddenly posing as their best
friends. "We are ignorant, illiterate and all that, but we are not altogether
so simple as to allow any person to impose himself on us as a friend when
he has been our enemy and oppressor, until the arms of the United States
struck the fetters from off our race.” Recitals of wartime faithfulness, then,
were apt to be accompanied by a clear statement of postwar expectations
and aspirations, with black petitioners basing their case on the need for
mutual respect and a common humanity. "It is contrary to nature,”
Georgia freedmen warned the state legislature, "to love that which is not
lovely.” 26

While proudly proclaiming their love of the South, black spokesmen
and nearly every black convention indicated a still higher loyalty. The
allegiance they professed to the nation, the Federal government, and the
Constitution took precedence over any regional identification. "We are
part and parcel of the great American body politic,” Kentucky blacks
declared. "We love our country and her institutions. We are proud of her
greatness, her glory and her might. We are intensely American.” And
being "intensely American,” they had naturally sympathized with the
Union cause in the Civil War. While blacks recited their wartime faithful¬
ness, then, they might wish to make clear at the very same time the
indispensable role many of them had played in crushing "the Slaveholder’s
Rebellion.” How they chose to phrase their wartime services often de¬
pended on the audience they were addressing. In the Appeal they adopted
for local consumption, Virginia blacks acknowledged their previous
"docility and obedience.” But in the Address they drew up for the United
States Congress, the same convention delegates described the conduct of a
people who had been neither "docile” nor "obedient.”

We, with scarce an exception, in our inmost souls espoused your cause,
and watched, and prayed, and waited, and labored for your success. In
spite of repeated discouragements we continued to flock to your lines,
giving invaluable information, guiding your scouting parties and your
minor expeditions, digging in your trenches, driving your teams, and in
every way lightening the labors of your soldiers; concealing and aiding
your soldiers who were escaping from the prison pens of a barbarous foe,
and when reluctantly permitted, we rallied by myriads under your ban¬
ner, and by the heroism illustrated at Fort Wagner, Port Hudson, Mil-
liken’s Bend and before Petersburg and Richmond, we demonstrated our

518

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

capacity to understand the ideas of the contest, and our worthiness to
stand side by side with the bravest in fighting it out.

No less explicit, William H. Grey, the leading force of the Arkansas freed-
men’s convention, excoriated the "bastard republic” which had been estab¬
lished in the South, with slavery as its cornerstone, and revealed how his
people had "thrown off the mask” and had provided the necessary force to
break the back of the rebellion and save the Union. At first, he conceded,
the mighty and educated northern Saxon had evinced little sympathy for
the slave. But the American people suddenly awoke in 1862 to find him less
of a fool than they had imagined. Beneath an exterior and "seeming re¬
spect” made up of endless chants of "yes, sir, massa” and "no, sir, massa,”
they discovered "a human soul, with a will and a purpose of its own.” And
Grey suggested that this discovery would have profound meaning for the
nation. "We have now thrown off the mask, hereafter to do our own talking,
and to use all legitimate means to get and to enjoy our political privileges.
We don’t want anybody to swear for us or to vote for us; we want to exercise
those privileges for ourselves.” The "peace and quiet” of Arkansas, he
warned, depended on it. 27

No matter how warmly they dwelled on the mutual affections and
shared experiences ofblacks and whites, no matter how genuine the profes¬
sions of loyalty and the recitals of wartime faithfulness, none of the many
postwar black meetings and conventions expressed the slightest tinge of
nostalgia for the old days of slavery. That experience, as they viewed it, had
been brutalizing and degrading. Although they might sympathize with the
plight of former masters and mistresses and with the losses their "white
folks” had sustained on the battlefield, such solicitude did not embrace the
Confederate war effort or the "peculiar institution.” In their overly concil¬
iatory Address to the Constitutional Convention, North Carolina freedmen
acknowledged an intimacy with whites "unknown to any other state of
society” and "attachments for the white race which must be as enduring
as life.” But that same Address talked of having emerged from a bondage
under which their race had "groaned” for 250 years and suffered indescrib¬
able "degradation.” Even as the Kentucky Colored People’s Convention
acknowledged some former slaveholders as their "best friends,” the view
ofbondage they incorporated in their Declaration ofSentiment was uncom¬
promising: "that cursed system under which we so long groaned, which
crushed every aspiration; debased us to the level with the beasts of the field;
robbed us of every attribute of humanity, and prostituted our wives, our
sisters, and daughters.” Nor did the Virginia convention, although denying
any ill will toward their former owners, hesitate to write into the Declara¬
tion of Rights and Wrongs an assessment of the "peculiar institution” as
scathing as any prewar abolitionist might have conceived:

We have been compelled, under pain of death, to submit to injuries
deeper and darker than the earth ever witnessed in the case of any other
people. We have been forced to silence and inaction; to look on the infer-

Becoming a People

519

nal spectacle of our sons groaning under the lash; our daughters rav¬
ished; our wives violated, and our firesides desolated, while we ourselves
have been led to the shambles, and sold like beasts of the field.

When that same convention debated the wording of its Appeal to the
American People, a delegate moved that the phrase "we feel no ill-will or
prejudice towards our former masters” be amended by striking out "our
former masters” and inserting "our former oppressors.” The convention
agreed to the change. 28

Having recalled the nightmare of slavery, black spokesmen could be
expected to voice a deep gratitude for their liberation and for the work of
northern benevolent associations and Federal officials in the South. But
praise for the North was often mixed with a bitter denunciation of north¬
ern emissaries who had allegedly betrayed their trust and mission. The
Alabama state convention found the actions of Union Army soldiers "a
source of great perplexity and discouragement to us”; far more scathing
condemnations of the occupation troops came from local meetings dealing
with local grievances, many of which spared few words to complain of daily
robberies and beatings by men wearing Union Army uniforms. 29 Nearly
every black convention endorsed the Freedmen’s Bureau; nevertheless, the
praise was apt to be tempered with criticism of the actions and racial
attitudes of various local agents. In Georgia, two blacks were elected as
"Anti-Bureau” delegates to the state convention of 1866 but they may not
have reached their destination; after denouncing the Bureau at a local
meeting as "mischievous and creative of disturbances between the races,”
they were arrested and jailed by the same agent they had criticized. Several
months later, the convention in Georgia, although supportive of the Bu¬
reau, heard from a number of delegates about local agents who were in¬
different to the fate of the freedmen, giving them no protection from hostile
whites and always siding with employers in labor disputes. Still another
convention that same year blamed the problems of the Bureau on the
appointment of native whites to official posts and urged that any new
openings be reserved exclusively for blacks or northern whites. Despite the
Bureau’s shortcomings, blacks recognized that even the minimal protec¬
tion it provided was better than none at all. In New Bern, North Carolina,
freedmen complained of the "atrocities” committed by several local Bureau
agents but thought them insufficient reason to dismantle the entire struc¬
ture. "As a few leaky places in the roof of a man’s house would not be
considered a sufficient ground for pulling it down and living out of doors
neither can we see sufficient reason in these abuses for removing the
Bureau but a greater reason why it should be perfected and maintained.” 30

Notwithst an ding the often severe condemnations of slavery, the black
convention movement in its appeals and strategy reflected far greater
concern with the oppressions of the present than with the atrocities of the
past. But blacks willingly drew upon the past, and in particular the revolu¬
tionary heritage of the American people, to press their case for a future.
To be subjected to taxation without representation, said Missouri blacks,

520

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

was as "gross and outrageous” a violation of their rights as that which had
moved colonists to wage a war for independence. Not only did blacks revive
the issues of the American Revolution but they invoked its imagery as well.
The Zion Church in Charleston, for example, where delegates to the state¬
wide black convention assembled in 1865, was compared to Faneuil Hall
in Boston, where patriots had plotted the struggle against British tyranny,
and Martin R. Delany, who spoke at the Charleston meeting, was intro¬
duced as "the Patrick Henry of his race in this, the second revolution for
the rights of the colored man.” The several conventions which drew up
Declarations of Rights and Wrongs modeled their recitation of grievances
on the most revered document of the nation—the Declaration of Indepen¬
dence—and black spokesmen borrowed heavily from it to underscore their
claim to the "inalienable rights” guaranteed every American. 31

Few moments in the freedmen’s conventions were as dramatic and
emotional as those set aside to hear the reports of individual delegates
about conditions in their respective localities. Clerics, teachers, field hands,
and urban artisans rose to their feet to describe the brutalities inflicted
upon their people back home—the mutilated bodies fished out of local
rivers, the restraints placed on black movement, the promised wages and
crop shares that remained unpaid, the churches and schoolhouaea set afire,
the intimidation of their leaders, and a judicial system that operated
largely to deprive them of justice rather than to redress their grievances.
The same themes kept repeating themselves. They were taunted with their
inferiority and ignorance by men who had conspired in the past to keep
them illiterate and who now refused to accord them even minimal opportu¬
nities for an education. They were told of their incapacity for self-govern¬
ment and voting by men who had never taught them to be anything but
slaves and who now refused to introduce them, even gradually, to any
political responsibilities. They were denounced as cowards by men who had
kept them disarmed and who now deprived them of any means to defend
themselves. 32

To strike a balance, as some conventions sought to do, between the
need to articulate their grievances, to demand full citizenship, and to allay
white suspicions of their actions proved to be a formidable undertaking.
And it would ultimately fail, largely because blacks could neither resolve
the contradiction between their advocacy of agitation and conciliation nor
compromise any of the demands they thought absolutely indispensable to
a free people. Few black activists, whatever their professions of concilia¬
tion, expected the deeply entrenched and pervasive racial ideology of the
white South to wither away by itself. Their optimism about the future
rested on their conviction that racial prejudices were susceptible to change
through legislation, equal enforcement of the law, and relentless black
agitation. To win their freedom, they had been entrusted with the rifle and
the cartridge box. To maintain that freedom, they now insists upon equal
access to the ballot box, the jury box, and the schoolhousc*. In drawing up
their demands, delegates to the Convention of the Colored People of South

Becoming a People

521

Carolina stated the minimal position assumed by nearly every black leader
and meeting in the immediate post-emancipation years:

We simply ask that we shall be recognized as men; that there be no
obstructions placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white
men shall govern black men; that we have the right of trial by a jury of
our peers; that schools be established for the education of colored chil¬
dren as well as white , and that the advantages ofboth colors shall, in this
respect, be equal; that no impediments be put in the way of our acquiring
homesteads for ourselves and our people; that, in short, we be dealt with
as others are—in equity and justice . 33

The preponderance of concern in nearly every black convention lay
with political and civil rights. Nothing, in fact, seems more perplexing
about these meetings, with their often eloquent appeals, petitions, and
declarations, than the virtual absence of any substantive economic content.
To read the convention documents is to learn little about the most immedi¬
ate and critical problem facing the great mass of former slaves—how they
would fare as free laborers working for employers who had only recently
been slaveholders. No convention debated the democratization of land pro¬
prietorship as an alternative to the perpetuation of the old dependency, nor
did delegates express alarm over the eviction of ex-slaves from abandoned
plantations which they claimed as their own. Only the Freedmen’s Conven¬
tion of Georgia went so far as to propose that slaves freed under the
Emancipation Proclamation be paid for any labor performed after January
1,1863. 34 But compensating black workers for years and decades of unpaid
labor as slaves never even warranted the same consideration given in some
white circles to compensating slaveholders for the losses they had sus¬
tained by emancipation.

While paying lip service to the land aspirations of the ex-slaves, the
black convention movement rejected any interference with the rights of
private property. Presuming to speak for the freedmen of Alabama, a state
convention in Mobile declared that they neither desired nor expected to
receive any man’s property without giving him "a just equivalent.” The
Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia suggested only that the Federal govern¬
ment dispose of Federal land in the South by offering it for sale to freedmen
under reasonable terms. The black newspaper in Opelousas, Louisiana,
envisioned families of freedmen in possession of independent homesteads,
but it made clear at the same time that blacks harbored no confiscatory
notions, such as those proposed "by some of the leaders of the Republican
Party in the North.” 35

The restraint exercised by black leadership on this issue reflected more
than its tacit acceptance of the prevailing middle-class ideology of white
Americans. In their overriding concern for realizing the same rights to life,
liberty, and property as whites enjoyed, black spokesmen did not wish to
undermine their own position by appearing to advocate confiscation. Per-

522

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

haps, too, they recognized the futility of that cause and the turmoil and
resentment that would inevitably fall on their heads if any such policy
were adopted. Whatever the reason, the black convention movement con¬
tented itself with demands for "even-handed justice” rather than "special
privileges or favor,” though such justice was apt to mean very little to
propertyless laborers caught up in the web of indebtedness and depen¬
dency.

To listen to black leaders, the way for propertyless ex-slaves to achieve
economic success differed in no significant respect from the advice tradi¬
tionally proffered to propertyless whites. Rather than affirm the need for
government action and planning to protect the interests of black agricul¬
tural laborers, the black convention movement, like most black newspa¬
pers, repeated the moral and economic injunctions and shibboleths that
were standard fare in nineteenth-century American society: success came
ultimately to the hard-working, the sober, the honest, and the educated, to
those individuals who engaged in "faithful industry,” practiced "judicious
economy,” cultivated habits of thrift and temperance, made their homes
"models of neatness,” and led moral, virtuous, Christian lives. 36 Jonathan
C. Gibbs, destined to be a leading black force in Reconstruction politics in
Florida, laid down a simple set of rules in the aftermath of the war: "If we
can secure, for the next ten years, three clean shirts a week, a tooth brush,
and spelling-book to every Freedman in South Carolina, I will go bail (a
thing I seldom do) for the next hundred years, that we will have no more
slavery, and both whites and blacks will be happier and better friends.” 37
Nearly every black convention, cleric, editor, and self-professed leader
repeated in one form or another these time-honored middle-class verities,
discountenanced vagrancy and pauperism, and extolled the virtues of the
Puritan work ethic. If blacks would only heed such advice, the doors that
were now closed to them would swing open and they would achieve the
respect and recognition of white Americans. That assumption would prove
to be as naive and mistaken as it was persistent.

When patronizing public places and riding in public transportation,
the most successful blacks invariably found themselves sitting in separate
compartments with the least successful blacks. Color, not class, made the
essential difference, and the black convention movement addressed itself
to this problem by insisting on equal access with whites to all public facili¬
ties. That was not the same thing as social equality, they assured whites,
nor did they intend or desire to thrust themselves into the private lives and
circles of whites. "We deem our own race, equal to all our wants of purely
social enjoyment,” the Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia resolved. If any¬
thing, blacks sought protection from white miscegenationists and trans¬
gressors—that is, from a perverse form of "social equality” in which whites
presumed to invade the sanctity of black families and approach their
women with "insulting and degrading propositions.” 38

The equality blacks insisted upon was equality before the law, in which
black testimony would be admitted into the courtroom and blacks seated

Becoming a People

523

on the juries. If this demand often loomed the largest, that was because
many black spokesmen viewed it as essential for the protection of their
lives and families and the necessary base on which suffrage and the acquisi¬
tion of property would rest. Even if some whites still recoiled at the thought
of black testimony and jurors, black leaders also perceived that these mea¬
sures were deemed far less controversial than the right to vote and hold
office. After all, blacks had enjoyed for some years the right of testimony
in northern states which refused to permit them to vote, and many south¬
ern whites who were uncompromising on the suffrage issue seemed willing
to yield on the lesser evil of equal rights in the courtroom, if only to restore
the courts to civil authority. That would simply extend to blacks a right the
Constitution already specified all free citizens should enjoy. Far less accept¬
able to whites were the proposals made by several black conventions that
the proportion of blacks on juries reflect the racial composition of the
region. 39

After the Virginia black convention drew up a powerful Declaration
of Rights and Wrongs, Henry Highland Garnet, a prewar abolitionist who
participated in the meeting as an "honorary member,” suggested a critical
change in the wording. Since blacks were in no position to retaliate in the
event whites refused to heed the Declaration, he thought it more respect¬
ful, "as humble petitioners,” to use the word "ask” instead of "demand”
when submitting their grievances to the American people. The delegates
agreed with Garnet and approved his amendment. The question raised by
Garnet’s move was by no means trivial. With the many appeals, petitions,
and declarations directed by these black conventions toward whites, what
if no one bothered to listen and the constitutional conventions and state
legislatures refused to act on even the most humbly worded requests? Few
black spokesmen addressed themselves directly to this possibility, except
to assure whites that they would never countenance insurrection or vio¬
lence. No matter what happened to their memorial, Mississippi blacks told
the forthcoming constitutional convention, "rest assured that we shall still
remain your friends, and keep the Star Spangled Banner above us.” Simi¬
larly, the Colored People’s Convention in Alabama advised their people to
be law-abiding, no matter what trials they might be forced to endure. "We
must rather suffer wrong, if evil-minded men inflict wrong upon us than
do wrong, while we seek to have those wrongs righted by law.” That same
meeting rejected insurrection as "inconsistent with our history as a people,
and the farthest from our desires or possible intentions.” 40

While rejecting violent alternatives, black spokesmen and conventions
tried to wield whatever leverage they thought they commanded to exact
from native whites a recognition of their legal rights. The arguments they
advanced, incorporating warnings of continued Federal intervention in the
affairs of the South, revealed a certain political sagacity. In the event the
constitutional conventions and legislatures rejected their demands, the
white men who controlled those bodies should be prepared to pay a political
price for their actions. If, for example, blacks who had loyally supported

524

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the Federal government had no right to representation, neither should
whites who had lately taken up arms against the government complain of
being denied representation in Congress. If blacks were deprived of the
right of testimony or representation on the juries, southern whites should
not expect to regain control over the judicial system. With similar shrewd¬
ness, blacks turned native white hostility to the Freedmen’s Bureau to
their own advantage by suggesting to Congress that the Bureau remained
an "indispensable necessity” until such time as they were in a position to
protect themselves through the vote, equal justice, and the right to bear
arms. 41

The ultimate leverage, as black spokesmen began to discern, lay in a
reorganization of the ex-Confederate states that would provide the freed
slaves with a political muscle commensurate with their electoral strength.
That perception increasingly found its way into the black newspapers and
conventions. While identifying themselves with their southern homeland
and adopting a conciliatory stance toward the old ruling class, black
spokesmen developed simultaneously a conception of postwar reconstruc¬
tion that most native whites would have thought downright traitorous.
And the longer whites persisted in denying them their demands and in
writing white supremacy into the legal codes of the states, the more blacks
would turn to the North and to Congress with their appeals. Even as blacks
denied any insurrectionary intent, they gave their support and subse¬
quently their votes to a reconstruction with revolutionary implications and
possibilities.

"Strange, novel, and anomalous,” the editor of the New Orleans Tribune
wrote of the position of occupied Louisiana in the Union. He might have
said the same of any of the ex-Confederate states. With few precedents to
guide the victors, the proper legal status of the vanquished South defied
any immediate or easy solution. That it became an issue at all stemmed
from sharply conflicting notions about the content of southern reconstruc¬
tion and whether the President or Congress should assume responsibility.
For the ex-slave, the furious debate that raged in Washington, D.C., over
this problem took on critical importance when its resolution spelled the
difference between a congressional reconstruction in which blacks partic¬
ipated as political equals with whites and a presidential restoration in
which they remained political mutes. "Be careful,” the Tribune advised
Congress, after assessing the results of President Lincoln’s all too lenient
proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction. "Magnanimity and amnesty
are noble things; but do not deliver yourselves into the hands of your
enemies—the enemies of progress, justice, and freedom.” 42

The skepticism with which southern whites greeted the conciliatory

Becoming a People

525

pronouncements of the black conventions resembled the suspicions they
had often attached to the professions of loyalty emanating from their
slaves. If anything, the evidence of possible duplicity seemed even more
compelling when whites compared the many recitals of regional loyalty in
the convention declarations with resolutions and petitions to Congress
which suggested betrayal. The same North Carolina convention that had
been so moderate in its demands and so loquacious in stating its identifica¬
tion with the South also praised the Radical faction of the Republican
Party, including individuals like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner,
who were an anathema to whites. Many of the same black meetings that
advised their people to cultivate good relations with the white population
also endorsed the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Civil Rights bill, and the Four¬
teenth Amendment, any one of which aroused intense emotional responses
from white Southerners. The same conventions and newpapers that cau¬
tioned their people against recriminations also urged Congress not to ac¬
cept the elected representatives from the southern states until blacks had
a voice in their selection. The Louisiana Equal Rights Convention even
refused to memorialize the state legislature in 1865, lest such an action be
misunderstood as recognizing the legitimacy of that body. 43

The apparent contradictions in their pronouncements about concilia¬
tion and reconstruction were not viewed by blacks as contradictions at all.
While wishing to live in racial harmony with their fellow whites, they
asked only that the relationship henceforth be based on legal equality.
While asking no indemnities for the past and expressing a willingness to
forgive whites for the sins of slaveholding, they did insist upon security for
the future. That consideration, more than any other, informed the attitude
toward southern reconstruction developed in the immediate postwar years
by a coterie of black leaders, many of whom would subsequently play a
significant role in the political life of their respective states. Revealing at
times a fine grasp of political strategy, they viewed the various proposals
regarding amnesty for former Confederates as inseparable from their own
claims to be admitted to all political privileges. That is, white men who had
committed treason (as defined by the Constitution) by waging war against
the United States could obviously not be trusted again with political power,
unless they shared that power with blacks who had proven their loyalty to
republican principles and to the sanctity of the Union. Nor could such
power be safely reposed in the exclusive hands of southern Unionists, as
President Lincoln envisioned, for their love of the Union reflected a desire
to return to the past and their forced acceptance of the Emancipation
Proclamation indicated no real concern for the condition or future of the
ex-slave. 44

Whatever might be done with the "political criminals” who had led the
South out of the Union, the New Orleans Tribune, voicing the usually more
radical position of the city’s mulatto community, insisted that any mag¬
nanimity be within well-defined limits and acknowledge the need for a
different organization of southern society.

526

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

We are not enemies of amnesty, and we do not ask to visit the iniquity
of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of
them that have Union and freedom. We are strong and generous enough
to disdain retaliation, and let the assassins of Fort Pillow expiate their
crime by a long and miserable existence. Although wronged to the last
and deprived of our best blood by this unholy rebellion, we do not ask for
the lives of the bloodthirsty foes. An amnesty sparing the lives of the
culprits will be something magnanimous, and worthy of our great and
generous Republic. But at the same time that we spare the lives of our
vanquished foes, let their property be forfeited.

Considering the punishments usually meted out to a people defeated in
war, the editor’s amnesty proposal seemed eminently fair. Rather than
execute or imprison the men who had betrayed the country, he suggested
only that the wealthy among them be reduced to poverty—that is, to a
condition already shared by millions of people who had stood by their
government and had fought and sacrificed their lives to preserve it. If many
whites who knew little of labor were thereby forced to work, that would
also be a most constructive form of rehabilitation.

Let them go to work; let them handle the spade or the hoe, for their own
benefit, as free laborers—we mean really free;—give them a chance for
retrieving their fallen fortune. To work is holy, honorable and noble. Let
them have a taste of it.... It is enough for the republic to spare the life
of the rebels,—without restoring to them their plantations and palaces.

The whole world will applaud the wisdom of the principle: amnesty for
the persons, no amnesty for the property . 45

Although large numbers of blacks—both the politically articulate and
the masses—might have sympathized with such "radical” notions of
amnesty and reconstruction, few black spokesmen publicly embraced a
position they deemed politically untenable. In subsequent years, in fact,
black leadership, although united in the determination to preserve the
gains of Reconstruction, sharply divided over the wisdom of removing
disfranchisement from ex-Confederate leaders. To permit them to return
to active political participation seemed like the best way to win their
approval of the work of black reconstructionists. But the democratic pro¬
pensities of black leaders in this respect would also prove to be their undo¬
ing. The New Orleans Tribune clearly anticipated as much more than two
years before the advent of Radical Reconstruction. Neither the Civil War
nor emancipation, that newspaper argued, had really altered the mentality
of the old slaveholding class, nor should blacks expect any genuine conver¬
sion to racial egalitarianism and democratic principles.

We must despair of this generation; for this generation has handled the
whips and sold human flesh in the market; and they are corrupt. Let
them die in peace. But, for God and the country's sake, do not make of

Becoming a People

527

them Governors, Lieutenant Governors, Judges, Mayors, Sheriffs, Sena¬
tors and Ministers to foreign countries.... We have had enough of shame
and humiliation. The nation has washed out the black spot on her es¬
cutcheon. Shall we honor and obey, now, the very men who made the
blot ? 46

Since the policies of Presidents Lincoln and Johnson seemed calculated to
produce precisely that result, the warning had been well grounded.

Despite the disappointment over Lincoln's lenient amnesty program,
his misplaced confidence in southern Unionists, and his "moderate” experi¬
ments in state reconstruction, the assassination of the President silenced
his black critics and threw a stunned black community into deep mourning,
as though it had lost its only white friend and protector. The President’s
initial doubts about the wisdom of emancipation and the enlistment of
blacks were now forgotten, his equivocations on civil rights ignored, his
schemes of colonization, expatriation, and reconstruction forgiven. Even
the cold language and forced nature of his Emancipation Proclamation no
longer seemed relevant, giving way to the legend of the Great Emancipator.
"Hereafter, through all time,” prophesied one black newspaper, "wherever
the Black Race may be known in the world; whenever and wherever it shall
lay the foundations of its power; build its cities and rear its temples, it will
sacredly preserve if not deify the name of 'Abraham, the Martyr. ’ ” In
heaping their praise on the fallen President, black clerics, editors, and
common laborers tended to repeat the same themes and evoke the same
images. He had completed the noble work begun by John Brown—"two
martyrs, whose memories will live united in our bosoms.” He was "the only
President who ever had the courage to acknowledge the true manhood of
the negro.” He had been "the greatest earthly friend of the colored race,”
"a Martyr to his cause, and a Sacrifice to his country.” 47 In a church on St.
Helena Island, South Carolina, freedmen prayed for Lincoln as they would
have prayed only for the Saviour himself. Christ had saved them from sin,
Lincoln had rescued them from slavery, and more than one freedman
thought them indistinguishable: "Lincoln died for we, Christ died for we,
and me believe him de same mans.” The manner of his death made him
a logical black hero, victimized by the same spirit of malice and hatred that
had brutalized black people for generations. For that very reason, the
South could not escape responsibility by ascribing the act to "individual
insanity,” at least not in the view of numerous black spokesmen. To treat
the assassin as a madman, they argued, would be to ignore the record of
deliberate and rational oppression from which four million black men and
women had only begun to emerge. 48

Among substantial numbers of freedmen, the initial shock of Lincoln’s
death was compounded by apprehension over the future. If the President
("Massa Sam”) and the government were one and the same, as some blacks
assumed, the results of the war, including emancipation, appeared to be
jeopardized. "We going to be slaves again?” more than one freedman

528

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

thought to ask. To Jack Flowers, who had made a spectacular wartime
escape to the Union lines in South Carolina, the assassination threatened
to undo his exploit. "I ’spect it’s no use to be here,” he said dejectedly. "I
might as well stayed where I was. It ’pears we can’t be free, nohow. The
rebs won’t let us alone. If they can’t kill us, they’ll kill all our friens’, sure.”
Former slaveholders had seized upon the President’s death to taunt the
freedmen about the suddenly dim prospects of freedom, a concerned mis¬
sionary wrote from Florida, "and some of our people began to talk of going
north to escape enslavement again, for as Massa Lincoln was gone they
feared their hope was gone too.” More typical may have been the many
whites who expressed immediate concern over how the freed slaves would
react to the assassination. Not unexpectedly, new rumors of insurrection¬
ary conspiracies circulated and the white residents of a number of towns
implored Federal authorities to double their precautions to keep the blacks
quiet and orderly. 49

To black spokesmen who had been openly critical of President Lin¬
coln’s reconstruction and amnesty programs, and to those who had re¬
pressed their misgivings, the significance of the assassination seemed
abundantly clear. The President had been victimized by his own mag¬
nanimity. His confidence in southern redemption and repentance had been
rewarded with an assassin’s bullet. The New Orleans Tribune , which had
been highly critical of the President, used the assassination to demonstrate
that the nation’s enemies had not yet been vanquished.

Abraham Lincoln, the honest, the good, the religious man, who did not

understand—be it said to his honor and glory-duplicity and trickery,

believed in the protestations and solemn oaths of rebels. He was too

confident, too lenient, and too mild. He was repaid with a pistol's bullet.

He did not know—as we do—what chivalry is.

Upon hearing of the assassination, black clergymen attending a conference
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore reacted in virtu¬
ally the same manner, praising Lincoln’s good works, forgiving his sins
("His errors were errors of the head, not of the heart”), and, most impor¬
tantly, urging "a sterner course” and the application of "more rigid princi¬
ples” toward the defeated South. If the American people heeded the
obvious lesson of this event, black spokesmen declared, they would realize
soon enough that most white Southerners remained "incorrigible rebels”
who willingly and deceitfully took the oath of allegiance to recover their
property and political power; the Rebels expected to win at the ballot box
what they had lost on the battlefield, and President Lincoln had been naive
enough to believe their protestations of loyalty. Fortunately, his successor
knew better. The future lay in good hands, most of these same black spokes¬
men agreed, for the new President understood "Southern pretenses and
Southern excesses” from his own experience and he would now do his duty.
"Agag is to be hewn into pieces,” a confident black cleric proclaimed, "and

Becoming a People 529

Samuel must come forward and wield the sword of destruction—that man
is Andrew Johnson*” 50

Despite the grievous loss of Lincoln, then, black spokesmen were al¬
most unanimous in their belief that Providence had chosen "a second
Moses” to guide them to "the land of promise.” None other than Andrew
Johnson himself made that solemn pledge, in addressing the black people
of Nashville: "Humble and unworthy as I am, if no other better shall be
found, I will be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of War and
Bondage to a fairer future of Liberty and Peace.” The New Orleans Tribune ,
with its own radical notions of reconstruction, thought well enough of the
new President to predict that his previously expressed hostility to concen¬
trations of political and economic power in the South presaged a vigorous
policy of land confiscation and redistribution. Like Lincoln, Johnson was
perceived as a man who exemplified the genius of democratic institutions,
having risen from a humble station to the highest office in the land. He had
proven his loyalty to the Union, and surely no man who had suffered "the
malignity of the Rebels,” as had Johnson, would seek to restore those
"traitors” to power. Where Lincoln had equivocated, Johnson could be
expected to be decisive. Where Lincoln had been overly magnanimous in
his treatment of the ex-Confederates, Johnson, who knew these people far
more intimately, would be firm and unyielding. 51

The assessment of Johnson’s personality traits proved accurate
enough, but blacks had badly misjudged his politics and racial views. In
upholding the principles of white supremacy, in expediting the pardon of
ex-Confederate leaders, in seeking to restore political and economic power
to the old ruling class, President Johnson would act all too decisively. And
in opposing even minimal civil rights for blacks, he would be firm and
unyielding. For some blacks, the disillusionment came earlier than for
most. Even as black newspapers and leaders still voiced their confidence
in the new President, field hands forced off the lands of pardoned Rebels
suspected that the battle had already been lost. At least, that was the
conclusion reached by a white teacher in the Sea Islands, as former masters
returned to claim their lands.

The people receive the rebels better than we expected, but the reason is
that they believe Johnson is going to put them in their old masters’ power
again, and they feel that they must conciliate or be crushed. They no
longer pray for the President —our President, as they used to call Lincoln
—in the church. They keep an ominous silence and are very sad and
troubled . 52

For black spokesmen, the President’s decision to pursue a "moderate”
reconstruction plan, permitting the white South to reconstruct herself
without black participation, prompted an initial disappointment that soon
gave way to disbelief. What blacks had viewed (on Johnson’s assurance) as
an "experimental” policy, designed to test white loyalty and intentions,

530

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

turned into a nightmare of repression, Black Codes, and unequal justice.
But rather than give up the "experiment” as a failure, which black leaders
h ?»d confidently expected, the President insisted that the new state govern¬
ments be legitimized. And blacks were left to contemplate still again the
betrayal of their expectations by a man they had only recently praised so
unrestrainedly. "Johnson has sold us,” Frederick Douglass wrote the pub¬
lisher of the New Orleans Tribune in October 1865, but it remained for
Congress "to pass upon the bargain.” Two months later, as Congress pre¬
pared to convene, the Tribune voiced the now deepening black disillusion¬
ment with the President’s policies. The editor urged Congress to assume
control of reconstruction, to make "no compromises with a conservative
and exclusively white-man loving administration,” and to hold the Presi¬
dent to his initial commitments. If treason were to be made "infamous,”
as Johnson had so often promised, the mode of punishment would have to
be severer than the rapidly accumulating stack of executive pardons of
former Confederate leaders suggested. 53

The President’s response to a delegation of black leaders in February
1866 did little to reassure the few blacks who still retained faith in him.
At this none too harmonious exchange of views in the White House, John¬
son introduced himself as "a friend of humanity, and especially the friend
of the colored man.” He offered once again, if they wished, to serve as their
Moses to lead them from bondage to freedom. But he made it clear that he
would not lead them to the ballot box, for that would only endanger their
freedom and invite race weir. Reaffirming his belief in government by
consent of the governed, he interpreted that principle to mean that the
white people in each state should determine the question of black suffrage.
The President pointedly ignored the delegate who asked him if he would
apply the principle of majority rule to states like South Carolina, where
blacks comprised a majority of the population. Nor did he take kindly to
Frederick Douglass’ argument that blacks needed the vote to protect them¬
selves from the already rampant violence which the President thought
would be unleashed in the event of black suffrage. As the exchange became
increasingly acrimonious, both sides thought it best to terminate the meet¬
ing, and Douglass told his fellow delegates: "The President sends us to the
people, and we go to the people.” After the "darkey delegation” left, Presi¬
dent Johnson reportedly turned to a private secretary and exclaimed,
"Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap! I know that
damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white
man’s throat than not.” Whether the President actually made that remark,
he proceeded to act in its spirit. 54

Within months after the White House meeting, the break between the
President and black leadership would be complete. James Lynch had ac¬
claimed Andrew Johnson on July 4,1865, as a firm champion of the African
race, but by March 1866 he thought the President was "more to be pitied
than feared.” Henry M. Turner was less charitable, deeming the President
dangerous as well as pitiful. "I charge Mr. Johnson with the murder of

Becoming a People

531

thousands of our people; for though he does not kill them personally, yet
he abets, or gives aid to these murderers, so that it actually amounts to a
direct encouragement.” No longer the noble successor to the martyred
Lincoln, Johnson now loomed for blacks as the new Jefferson Davis. Pre¬
suming to be a second Moses, he acted more like "a very excellent type of
Pharaoh.” Pretending to sympathize with the ex-slaves in their new free¬
dom, he vetoed the legislation blacks deemed essential to preserve that
freedom. And when he advised the states to reject the Fourteenth Amend¬
ment, blacks turned to Congress for an alternative to the callous disregard
of human rights that distinguished the occupant of the White House. "The
future looks dark,” a black newspaper observed, "and we predict, that we
are entering upon the greatest political contest that has ever agitated
the people of the country—a contest, in which, we of the South must be
for the most part spectators; not indifferent spectators, for it is about us
that the political battle is fought. The issue is fairly joined.” 55

With the issue "fairly joined,” the same urgency that prompted black
leaders to look to Congress for relief also moved equal suffrage to the
forefront of their demands. The initial hesitation to press that issue, as at
the Freedmen’s Convention in North Carolina in 1865, proved short-lived,
particularly after the conciliatory appeals to the constitutional conven¬
tions and state legislatures had yielded only oppressive Black Codes and
not even a hint of future political participation. For black leadership, the
suffrage issue quickly assumed a significance that rivaled the emotional
investment tens of thousands of black laborers had made in the idea of
"forty acres and a mule.” Both suffrage and land came to be regarded,
albeit with sharply contrasting emphases by different classes of the black
population, as indispensable to freedom. Only by winning the vote, black
leaders told their people, would the other aspirations they cherished have
a chance for fulfillment. "The only salvation for us besides the power of the
Government,” Virginia freedmen declared, "is in the possession of the
ballot. Give us this, and we will protect ourselves.” 56

Political realism and the middle-class economic outlook of black lead¬
ership helped to determine the ordering of priorities. Predictably, then, the
suffrage issue, not "forty acres and a mule,” came to dominate the black
conventions, newspapers, and oratory. While the demand for land raised
the ugly specter of confiscation and the abrogation of the rights of property,
the demand for the vote simply reaffirmed traditional American principles
of equal opportunity, fair play, and government by the consent of the
governed. To make this absolutely clear, black spokesmen invoked on every
possible occasion the revolutionary traditions of the American nation and
appealed to whites on the basis of their most cherished freedoms. If taxed

532

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

to support national and state government, blacks demanded the right to
participate in choosing the men who imposed and spent the taxes. If sub¬
jected to the laws of the land, blacks demanded a voice in selecting those
who would make and administer the laws. "I tell you, sah,” a North
Carolina freedman explained to a northern visitor, "we ain’t noways safe,
’long as dem people makes de laws we’s got to be governed by. We’s got to
hab a voice in de ’pintin’ of de law-makers. Den we knows our frens, and
whose hans we’s safe in.” Few white Americans could quarrel with those
sentiments without violating their own history and traditions. But if they

blacks grounded their demand for suffrage on an even more direct
appeal to the patriotic instincts of the American people. 57

If blacks could be trusted with the musket, they could be trusted with
the ballot, and the nation owed at least as much to those who had helped
to defend it as to those who had tried to destroy it. Their claims to the
suffrage, blacks maintained, had already been validated by the martyrdom
of Crispus Attucks in the American Revolution, by the valor of black
soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans in 1812 and most recently on the
battlefields of the Civil War. This patriotic appeal was made frequently, if
only because it seemed calculated to win sympathy in the North, where
black leaders were now certain the final decision would be made. At the
same time, blacks pressed their case on the basis of whites already permit¬
ted to vote. If men who had fought against the government could vote, why
not loyal Americans who had remained steadfast in their support of the
government? If "the very poorest and meanest of white men” and foreign
immigrants barely acculturated to American values and principles (such
as the "lowly” Irish) could be trusted to exercise the franchise, why not
blacks whose roots were as deep as those of any American, including the
President himself? 58

By citing the admission of immigrants to political privileges, black
leaders sought to make two important points. The case of the Irish sug¬
gested to them that wealth and literacy were not considered valid criteria
for depriving any person of the suffrage. The fact that distinct ethnic
groups like the Jews voted without restriction further suggested that politi¬
cal equality need not lead to social mixing, as some whites feared. "They
enjoy all the privileges that any white American enjoys in this country,”
a black newspaper said of the Jews, but "there is not as much social
co mminglin g between the Jew and the white American as between the
white American and the black man.” In the Anew of the Colored American,
a black newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, only three classes of the population
could be properly deprived of the right to vote: foreigners, children, and
women, whose "sphere is anywhere but in the arena of politics and govern¬
ment.” 59 Although some black leaders were less dogmatic on the question
of extending the vote to women, the issue was seldom raised lest it confuse
and undermine the more urgent cause of black suffrage.

In petitioning the Constitutional Convention for suffrage rights, a
black meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, frankly admitted the "deplor-

Becoming a People

533

able ignorance” of the majority of their people. Nor did they expect "the
ignorant” to be admitted to the exercise of privileges "which they might
use to the injury of the State.” While conceding this point, however, blacks
in Charleston and elsewhere insisted that ignorance was not a deficiency
peculiar to Afro-Americans but characterized large numbers of whites—
North and South. If "the ignorant” were to be deprived of the vote, then,
consistency demanded the disfranchisement of tens of thousands of whites.
If, on the other hand, ignorant whites voted without undermining Ameri¬
can institutions, ignorant blacks could be trusted as well. Although prefer¬
ring universal manhood suffrage, black leaders were willing to accept
educational and property tests, but only if they were applied honestly and
equally to both races. 60 That would immediately enfranchise literate and
propertied blacks, while encouraging others to emulate them. In the 1890s,
black leaders would advance a similar proposal as a way of forestalling
total disfranchisement. But whether in the 1860s or in the 1890s, black
support for conditional suffrage rested on the false assumption that their
white opponents objected only to ignorant and poor blacks voting and on
the naive belief that whites would disfranchise some of their own people.
Actually, most black leaders knew better and suggested conditional suf¬
frage only as a way of unveiling white hypocrisy and obtaining full suf¬
frage. "Is a white voter required to know how to read and write?” a black
newspaper asked. "To be a moral, a religious or a temperance man? Not
in the least.... He enjoys his political rights simply because he is a man
and a citizen.” The black man asked for no less than that. 61

To admit ignorant blacks to political privileges, white critics charged,
would inevitably produce a massive pool of voters that could be easily
manipulated by the employers who commanded their labor and by un¬
scrupulous politicians who would play upon their expectations. Somehow,
the black man as a voter could never be perceived as acting in his own best
interests. Seeking to reject that stigma, black spokesmen, in addition to
citing a wartime record of service to the Union, suggested that even under
the most oppressive conditions of slavery, the black man had not neces¬
sarily been unmindful of what was best for himself and his family.

Now, every candid minded man knows full well that the former slaves
have always done just what their masters never wanted them to do. The
master never wanted his slave to run away, or to eat his swine and cattle,
no matter how injustly or inhumanly he was treated or how near starva¬
tion he might be. Yet it was done in both of these instances. In fact, to
"fool and worry old massa ” had become second nature to the slave . 62

To the suggestion that the "superior knowledge and cunning” of the
whites would overawe them at the polls, a black meeting in Virginia re¬
sponded that unlike many enfranchised whites they could be depended
upon not to vote for "traitors” or at the dictation of "the mitred priest” or
the "rich rumseller.” Nor would they ever abuse suffrage by voting to take

534

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

their states out of the Union. "Mr. Judge, we always knows who’s our
friends and who isn’t,” a black preacher in Georgia assured a skeptical
northern dignitary.

We knows the difference between the Union ticket and the Rebel ticket.

We may not know all about all the men that’s on it; but we knows the
difference between the Union and the Rebel parties. Yes, sir; we knows
that much better than you do! Because, sir, some of our people stand
behind these men at the table, and hear ’em talk; we see ’em in the house
and by the wayside; and we know ’em from skin to core, better than you
do or can do, till you live among ’em as long, and see as much of ’em as
we have . 63

With equal disdain, blacks dismissed the contention that they would neces¬
sarily vote for the old ruling class by virtue of the economic power it still
wielded. "Have the employers of white voters always controlled their
votes?” one black petition queried. "Let the history of elections answer.”
If former slaves voted the same way as their former masters, that would
only suggest that their former masters had become enlightened enough to
accept new ideas and political principles. 64

The only legitimate test for suffrage, most blacks agreed, lay not in a
person’s literacy or economic well-being but in his loyalty to the govern¬
ment and democratic principles. The Civil War demonstrated to them the
absence of any necessary correlation between property holding, literacy,
and loyalty to the government; indeed, said one black newspaper, "the
errors of ignorance have done less harm than have the graft and venality
of the better informed.” Having taken this position, blacks rejected the
popular suggestion that they needed to be prepared for suffrage and should
only be gradually introduced to political privileges. That, said the New
Orleans Tribune, smacked too much of the calculated deceit whites had
employed before the war to rationalize the perpetuation of slavery. "They
talked of preparing and educating the blacks, so as to qualify them for
liberty; but at the same time they were careful that the slaves should not
educate or elevate themselves. If we admit the objection, it will hold good
forever.... The actual enjoyment of new rights is the only way to get
accustomed to and become fit for their exercise.” Besides, to postpone
suffrage until blacks acquired an education penalized them for previous
restrictions over which they had no control and deprived the Union of their
much-needed support at the polls. 65

If whites required more than verbal assurances that blacks could exer¬
cise the vote responsibly, black leaders in some regions organized mock
elections, scheduled them to coincide with the regular elections, and told
their people to register and cast their ballots. As early as May 1865, blacks
in Norfolk, Virginia, participated in the election of state legislators. Ex¬
cluded from the regular political process, they held their own ward meet¬
ings, conducted a registration drive, improvised a polling place in the local

Becoming a People

535

African Methodist Episcopal Church, and on election day voted their pref¬
erence among the regular candidates. After tabulating the results, making
certain to add to them the votes of the black voters, they appealed to both
the state legislature and the United States Congress to recognize the legiti¬
macy of their actions and the validity of their ballots. To no one’s surprise,
they had voted almost unanimously for the "men of tried fidelity to the
Union, and of liberal sentiments.” 66 Similar elections were reported in
places like Beaufort, South Carolina (November 8, 1864); Fernandina,
Florida (where black votes were counted in a mayoralty election); and New
Orleans. 67

With the presence of an outspoken black press and an articulate,
well-organized leadership drawn from the free colored community, the
situation in New Orleans was unusual. Although slaves constituted more
than half the black population, the well-entrenched mulatto "aristocracy”
quickly assumed a dominant influence after Union occupation in April
1862. The tens of thousands of field hands who poured into the city from
the outlying rural districts during and immediately after the war might
have found this colored leadership both bewildering and alien. Enjoying
privileges not available to the slaves, such as the right to acquire property
(including slaves), they tended to be light-colored mulattoes, quadroons,
and octoroons, proud of their Creole heritage, literate and educated, and
occupying skilled and professional positions. Within this exclusive group,
moreover, classes existed, based upon gradations of wealth and color, an¬
cestry, cultural pretensions, education, and church affiliation. 68

No sooner had Union troops entered New Orleans than the demand for
full admission to political privileges surfaced in the colored community.
Obviously, the usual objections to extending the vote to poor and ignorant
blacks could hardly be sustained against such an educated, propertied, and
politically conscious colored population. When these blacks called for an
end to taxation without representation, as they immediately did, they were
not referring to future expectations of taxable property but to an already
prevailing condition. Hard-pressed as to how to respond to the demand for
voting privileges, whites ultimately came up with a solution that would
neatly resolve the difficulty while at the same time split the mulattoes from
the black freedmen and uphold the essential principles of white suprem¬
acy. The so-called Quadroon Bill introduced into the state legislature in
1864 defined as a "white person” anyone possessing no more than one
fourth of Negro blood and admitted such individuals to the same privileges
enjoyed by other whites, including the suffrage.

Not only was the proposition inviting but it promptly brought to a head
the charge that the mulatto community acted indifferently toward the
mass of black people in Louisiana, most of whom resided outside of New
Orleans and were only beginning to emerge from the degradation of slav¬
ery. But the response to the Quadroon Bill contradicted that assumption
soon enough. Neither the New Orleans Tribune, the principal voice of the
colored community, nor the colored leaders would lend any support to the

536

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

proposal; instead, they denounced it as divisive (creating distinctions of
"white, white-washed and black”) and preposterous ("If a quadroon has a
right to vote, why not a mulatto? ... If we take one-half or one-third of the
colored population, to make citizens and voters, why not two-thirds or
three-fourths?”). Not content with denouncing the bill, colored leaders
thought this an ideal time to call for a coalition of blacks, regardless of color
or previous condition, that would demand the immediate admission of all
citizens on an equal basis to political and civil rights.

The colored men of this country fully understand their position at the
present time; they know that, in the Union there is strength; they are
determined to be all emancipated from this absurd prejudice of caste; or
perish as one man under its weight. Those that imagine that they are
divided are much mistaken.

The Quadroon Bill went down to defeat, in part because many white legisla¬
tors objected to any "black” people voting. But the debate had gone far to
allay the freedmen’s apprehensions about the motives and priorities of the
free colored community. 69

With their pleas for equal suffrage rejected, blacks in Louisiana coordi¬
nated their activities to participate in the November election of 1865.
Whether their votes would be recognized or not, the Tribune urged every
black man to register to vote and to preserve his certificate "as a testimony
that he can in after-time bequeath to his children. It will show that in 1865
he was wide awake to the importance of obtaining his rights.” Even as the
Republican Party began to organize in Louisiana that same year, t ie Tri¬
bune, although designated the official party organ, implored the black
population not to submerge themselves or their aspirations beneath the
dictation of political expediency. "Let us be the allies of the Republicans,
not their tools; let us retain our individuality, our banner, and our name.” 70

Elsewhere in the South, blacks also mounted campaigns to win the
right of suffrage and to erase racial distinctions from the statute books.
Whether that agitation took the form of Equal Rights Leagues, petitions,
or mock elections, it attested to a growing political consciousness, particu¬
larly in the urban centers. But although blacks thereby gained valuable
political experience, the impact of their meetings, petitions, and appeals on
state and Federal legislative bodies and on white public opinion remained
minimal . No matter how eloquently or forcefully they made known their
grievances and demands, their political status rested ultimately on the
fluctuating moods and machinations of white politicians in Washington
and on the rapidly growing confrontation between President Andrew John¬
son and the United States Congress. What helped to make possible the
extension of the suffrage and civil rights to black Americans was not the
activities of black activists (who lacked the necessary power to give force
to their appeals), or the northern abolitionists (many of whom rested con¬
tent with the achievement of emancipation), or even the Radical Republi-

Becoming a People

537

cans (most of whom would have stopped short of enfranchising blacks), but
the insistence by the white governments in the South that the essentials
of the old order be maintained without a modicum of concession and the
equally unyielding determination of the President to validate the work and
the spirit of those governments.

In adversity and defeat, blacks found the makings of their eventual
triumph. Nor did the irony of the situation escape them.

The unexpected policy of our anomalous President may be just as neces¬
sary to the great work of our enfranchisement in this country as were the
defeats sustained by McClellan to the employment of colored soldiers and
the recognition of our citizenship.... The brakes on the railroad car are
often of more service than the locomotive. We often need the cloud more
than the sunshine.... Paradoxical as it may seem, President Johnson’s
opposition to our political interests will finally result in securing them
to us . 71

Few political analysts could have been more discerning. Although some
blacks claimed to regret the clash between the President and Congress, and
even as most of them condemned the actions of the Johnson governments
in the South, they were hardly averse to profiting from the blunders of
their enemies. When ten of the eleven former Confederate states, at the
urging of the President, rejected ratification of the Fourteenth Amend¬
ment, none expressed greater relief or joy than black leaders and newspa¬
pers. "Thank God, the Southern oligarchy are blind,” the New Orleans
Tribune observed. "This stubbornness of the conquered to refuse the mild
and generous terms offered by the conqueror, can only bring the latter to
exact stronger guaranties.” Had the amendment been ratified, the Tribune
noted, Congress would have been "morally obliged” to recognize the new
southern governments and admit their "unpatriotic and illiberal” repre¬
sentatives. "But, thank God, the governing class of the South has not
learned prudence yet.... Their folly will save us and save our liberties for
the future. It is better for us that the work of reconstruction be protracted.
Let the rebels do our work.” 72

To win the Civil War and preserve the Union, President Lincoln had
been forced to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to authorize the
enlistment of black soldiers. To secure the peace and preserve the gains of
the war, black leaders now believed, Congress would be forced to admit
them to full participation in political life and to guarantee their civil rights.
Confident of precisely that outcome, James Lynch told a state convention
of Tennessee blacks in August 1865 to prepare themselves for political
power.

In the past struggle, when the nation stood trembling upon the verge of
the precipice, the black man came to the rescue, his manhood was recog¬
nized in that hour of national trial, and why? From necessity... We were

538

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

needed to fill up the army, we were needed to supply the place of copper¬
head conscripts who had no stomach for the fight.... And the question
of political power in this country will soon present another necessity
which will give us the ballot box.

The return of the South to the Union with enhanced political representa¬
tion, made possible by abrogation of the three-fifths clause of the Constitu¬
tion, made this matter all the more urgent, and black spokesmen and
newspapers never tired of reminding the North what it might expect if it
refused to extend the vote to the former slaves. The "safety and protection”
of the nation demanded no less. "Let us help you fight the rebels at the
ballot-box,” Tennessee blacks pleaded. 73

With every blundering step made by President Johnson, black people
came closer to a full recognition of their rights. But the victory, when it
came, would be something less than a triumph of democratic principles.
That is, Congress would yield to political necessity, not to the spirit of the
Declaration of Independence or to black arguments about patriotic service
to the country, taxation without representation, and the natural rights of
man. Understandably, blacks would celebrate the triumph, while ignoring
the mixed motives that made it possible. If they exuded a certain confi¬
dence, however, that may have reflected the experience of the past two
years, in which they had prepared themselves for this eventuality. Few
could contend, at least, that the privileges of voting and holding political
office had suddenly been thrust upon a people who had previously given
little or no consideration to political matters. By 1867, the issues had been
clarified, leaders had emerged, and organizations were being formed to
mobilize the mass of blacks who may not have been reached by the conven¬
tion movement and the black press.

Nearly a half century after emancipation, W. E. B. Du Bois grappled
with the problem of black identity. The Negro appeared to him as "a sort
of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this Ameri¬
can world.” Forced to view himself through the eyes of white men, to
calculate his every move and word in terms of their expectations and
demands, his vision permitted him no "true self-consciousness” but rather
exposed him to a myriad of conflicting images.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul
by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One
ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being tom asunder.

Becoming a People

539

The history of the Afro-American, Du Bois contended, revolved around this
perennial conflict—"this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to
merge his double self into a better and truer self.” What seemed essential,
however, was that blacks, while seeking admission to white society, not
sacrifice their racial heritage and individuality.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for
he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes
to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,
without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the
doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face . 74

Without the advantage of Du Bois’s hindsight on Reconstruction and
its tragic aftermath, blacks in the postwar years confronted the paradox
of racial identity—how to define themselves as a people and as a race in
relation to a society made up largely of whites who viewed themselves
superior by virtue of the color of their skin, their Anglo-Saxon heritage,
their mental endowments, and their future prospects. Since they aspired
to the same rights exercised by white citizens, some blacks thought it
imperative to underscore their Americanism, to demonstrate the ardor of
their national loyalty, to disprove current theories of racial inferiority, and
to show how much more acculturated they were to American ways and
values than the recent arrivals from Europe. "We want to understand that
we are no longer colored people, but Americans,” John Mercer Langston
told a black gathering in 1866.

We have been called all manner of names. I have always called our people
negroes. Perhaps you don’t like it—I do. I want it to become synonymous
with character. We are no longer negroes simply—no longer colored
people simply, but a part of the great whole of the mighty American
nation . 75

To affirm their American identity, blacks noted the various cultures
that made up the civilizations of the world and the emergence of a new
"race” in the United States. Whether descended from Europeans or Afri¬
cans, they suggested, Americans—white and black—were in the process of
developing racial characteristics "as severely individual” as those of Eu¬
ropeans, Asians, and Africans. Surely, the voice of the AME Church would
argue, no one could expect black people in the United States to be Africans
after their lengthy residence in this land.

To say that we could have preserved our African characteristics after
dwelling for almost three centuries upon this continent, is most un-
philosophical. Were it true we would be the most stolid race of the world
—but whoever credited the negro for stolidity! The fact is, we are thor¬
oughly Americans, and by reason of the fact that we have been here
longer than the majority of the new American race, we have developed
more fully than they, the characteristics by which it is to be known.

540

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

If the "negro character” differed in any respect from that of other citizens,
the editorial concluded, the reason seemed abundantly apparent—"their
character, is not American. Ours, is.” 76

So intent were some blacks on demonstrating their identification with
American values that they contrasted the advantages they enjoyed by
virtue of their long exposure to white Americans with their less fortunate
brethren in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Negroes of the Spanish
West Indies and Brazil were singled out, in particular, as "the lowest of our
race on the American continent,” largely because most of them were Afri¬
can-born and had not yet thrown off "its barbaric usages.” Even the Hai¬
tians, although "a noble race” with a proud history, lacked "those elements
of order, of cool deliberation, of submission to authority” necessary for good
government. But blacks in the United States had learned their lessons from
the best possible teachers.

The American Negro, unlike his brethren, has been the pupil of the cool,
aspiring, all conquering Saxon, and in no little measure he has partaken
of all the greatness of his master. From him has he learned that form of
government that is as surely destined to prevail the world over, as there
is absolute worth in man ...

Having resided by the side of their white brethren, blacks had imbibed the
principles of republican government and Protestantism. "And being the
most imitative of men, as saith his enemies, he bids fair to rival his great
teacher.” 77

Even as blacks emphasized their American roots, they could not agree
on whether they were Negro, colored, black, or African Americans. The
ongoing debate over how they should be addressed revealed at the same
time differences over how they conceptualized themselves as a race and a
regard for how whites employed the various terms. The objections to "ne¬
gro,” for example, rested partly on its association with slavery and the
tendency of whites to use it as a term of reproach. "We call each other
colored people, black people, but not negro because we used that word in
secesh times,” a South Carolina freedman testified in 1863. Both "negro”
and "black” also suggested unmixed ancestry and hence excluded large
numbers of colored people. "Is your Chairman a negro?” James Lynch
asked the delegates to a Convention of the Colored People of Tennessee.
"Or your Secretary, or any of your officers, or your other members or those
sergeants sitting over there? They are all mixed blood. We are not ashamed
of the term 'negro/ but to call it a 'negro convention’ is a lie.... It is very
hard to tell whether there is any pure blood or not, because white men used
to love colored women very much.” Nor did "African” fare very well,
particularly at a time when black leaders sought to educate their people
to their Americanness. Henry M. Turner, a leader in the African Methodist
Episcopal Church, agreed with several of his ministerial colleagues that
the term "African” should be stricken from the title, if only because it

Becoming a People

541

suggested exclusion; on the other hand, "unlike the most of my race,” he
claimed pride in being called a Negro. "When I am walking the streets of
a city, and hear some one say, there goes a negro preacher, or a negro
chaplain, I feel a peculiar exaltedness.” By the 1870s, the issue was far from
settled, though "colored” seemed the most acceptable term, and a Louisi¬
ana newspaper indicated a willingness to accept "Negro” as long as it was
capitalized, like any other nationality. "The French, German, Irish, Dutch,
Japanese and other nationalities, are honored with a capital letter but the
poor sons of Ham must bear the burden of a small n.” 78

Whatever terminology they used to describe themselves, some blacks
preferred to look, act, and sound as little Negro, colored, or black as possi¬
ble. By adopting the fashions, the life styles, the manners, and even the
color of white society, they would be absorbed into the dominant society
that much sooner. The advertisements appearing in black newspapers, for
example, not only acknowledged the premium placed on whiteness but
sought to place that aspiration within everyone's reach; if they could not
turn white, they could purchase various devices calculated to bring them
to the threshold of whiteness.

There cometh glad tidings of joy to all ,

To young and to old , to great and to small;

The beauty which once was so precious and rare ,

Is free for all , and all may be fain
BY THE USE OF CHASTELLARS WHITE LIQUID ENAMEL

Still other advertisements promised scientific treatments that would en¬
able black women to excel "the famed beauty of the Caucasians.” 79

What they could not achieve with skin whiteners or hair treatments,
some blacks hoped to attain by modeling their social functions and attire
on white society. If they could not be absorbed into that society, they would
establish their own society within a society—a replica of that from which
they were excluded. Such pretentiousness, however, particularly when it
manifested itself in lavish expenditures, provoked bitter responses in the
black community. William J. Whipper, a northern-born black who settled
in South Carolina after the war, berated the "worshippers of false gods” he
found among his own people. ff Fashion rules the hour,” he wrote in 1866,
"and, like menial slaves, we do its bidding.... The street, the church, and
the ball-room are the theatres for its display of presumptive impudence.”
It simply made no sense. To obscure their lowly station in life, blacks were
expending money on luxuries which they could ill afford, thereby com¬
pounding their poverty in a vain effort to hide it.

Our real condition is obscured by falsehood. In our attempts to cheat
others, we cheat ourselves. We wear fine clothing, silks, satins, broad¬
cloth, and trinkets, for the purpose of representing our wealth, while

542

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

every person possessing a grain of common sense thinks quite to the
contrary.

In their attempts to emulate whites, Whipper concluded, black people were
totally ignoring the system of economy and industry that would ultimately
enable them to achieve that objective. Making that point even more ex¬
plicit, a black newspaper in Louisiana suggested that only the ownership
of land would bring to blacks the respectability they now sought by indulg¬
ing themselves in the white man’s fashions and follies.

Because we had to put up with a home-spun suit before emancipation we
are determined to wear a silk one now no matter at what cost to our
stomachs or our landlords. We are a poor people: everybody knows it: we
are an ignorant people, the fact speaks for itself; we are an inexperienced
people as every day’s transactions will prove, and yet it is a painful fact
that we will spend more time and money to appear what we are not, than
it would cost to be what we pretend to be.

And yet this same newspaper that scorned lavish dress and entertainments
featured articles describing fancy balls of colored people, the finery of their
clothes, and the excellence of their repasts; indeed, in the very same issue
and on the same page as the editorial on "Extravagance Among Colored
People” appeared "The Fashion Department,” with tips on "Summer
Styles and Novelties.” Similarly, the same newspapers that extolled the
virtues of blackness and eloquently appealed to race pride often included
advertisements on how black people could make themselves more white. 80

The paradox did not lend itself to any easy or immediate resolution.
But the frank discussion of such questions did force blacks to examine
critically who they were and the nature of their relationship to white
society. If some were naturally drawn toward the models and values of that
society, still others thought the loss of racial distinctiveness too heavy a
price to pay for admission. To ape the ways of a people who mocked,
degraded, and ostracized them, moreover, in the expectation they could
gain the respect of such people, would most likely be an exercise in futility
and reinforce their feelings of inferiority. To shed their Negroness, white¬
wash their culture, and deny their ancestral homeland would result in still
more self-hatred and self-deprecation. "They seemed to think that by repu¬
diating the word 'colored’ they would become white,” a veteran black aboli¬
tionist observed; "that though they were as black a man as I, they, by
rejecting that word colored would directly become as white as the natives
of this country.” James Lynch, before embarking on his political career in
Mississippi, thought he understood the type all too well—those who placed
no value on the ability of men of their own race, who adopted the opinions
respecting them that most whites held, who preferred white men as reli¬
gious instructors, teachers, physicians, and lawyers because they were
white, who disparaged their own color and thereby paid homage to the

Becoming a People

543

alleged superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. And invariably, if such individuals
should be flattered, feted, or rewarded by whites, "they will kiss the hands
of the oppressor and ally themselves with the enemies or disparagers of
their race.” 81

To counter the self-debasing images with which their people had been
inculcated, black spokesmen needed to confront their cultural and national
origins. While almost unanimously rejecting emigration and affirming
their American heritage and identity, they might have been expected to
harbor ambivalent feelings about their relationship to Africa. To identify
with Africa raised the specter of a separate nationality, as well as awkward
questions about backwardness and semi-barbarism, and might encourage
those whites who still wished to return them there. For some blacks, in fact,
the remoteness of Africa, both geographically and culturally, and the
effects of race mixing in the United States only served to accentuate their
Americanness. "We are not Africans,” one black leader proclaimed, "but
a mixed race, mingling Saxon, Indian, and African blood.” Rather than
deny the past, however, numerous black spokesmen preferred to embrace
it as a source of racial pride. To reject emigration did not require blacks
to reject Africa as their ancestral homeland, any more than English, Irish,
and German Americans felt compelled to dissociate themselves from their
national origins.

Should a man despise his mother because she is black, or an African? All

Africans are not black. If being born in Africa makes a man an African,

then we are not Africans; but no matter where the place of our birth, we

are still the descendants of Africans, and, of course, belong to that race . 82

Nor did blacks necessarily subscribe to the prevailing image of Africa
as a hopelessly backward, semi-barbaric Dark Continent with neither a
past nor a future; on the contrary, the impressions conveyed in the black
press tended to emphasize the rich and varied cultures and the ancient
Negro empires from which they were descended. Africa had been the very
cradle of civilization, with the black race acting as "the promoters and the
originators of social progress.” The first significant and "brilliant” culture
in the world had been founded by the Egyptians, a mulatto people who had
been instructed in the rudiments of art and industry by Ethiopians, a
pure-black people. If portions of Africa now resembled a Dark Continent,
for which the barbaric slave trade conducted by Europeans bore partial
responsibility, that same darkness had once engulfed the Caucasian race
and vestiges of it still existed among whites. "What should we think of the
Caucasian race if we had to judge that race from the wild and naked brutes
of Andaman, or even from the 'lazzaronF of Naples?” Scoffing at the notion
of African inferiority, a black leader in North Carolina noted that the
Anglo-Saxon had once worn a "brass collar on his neck and the name of
his Norman master marked on it.” With equal cogency, the New Orleans
Tribune asked, "Who are you that boast yourselves over the descendants

544

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

of Africans? A few centuries ago, your forefathers were savages, in the
wilds of Britain, Germany or Gaul; we Americans, of whatever nationality,
are all alike descended from barbarians. ,, The extent to which the black
press and leadership reflected the conceptions of Africa that reposed in the
great mass of Afro-Americans remains difficult to determine; many ex¬
slaves were no doubt too preoccupied with survival in the United States to
concern themselves with such matters, while others may have been the
subject of a caustic observation by the official voice of the African Method¬
ist Episcopal Church: "It is possible, even now, for a negro to say, 'What
have I to do with Africa?’ and not be frowned down; nay, it is somewhat
popular.” 83

What admittedly compounded the problem of identity and conceptions
of Africa was the extent to which Americans, including many blacks, had
been inculcated with the notion that whiteness was not only more accept¬
able but more beautiful and alluring. The slaves who thought they would
turn white with emancipation were very few but those who resorted to
artificial devices to approximate white features numbered in the thousands
and laid the basis for several commercial fortunes in black cosmetology at
the end of the century. Recognizing the importance of developing self-pride
and racial consciousness in their people, some black spokesmen thought
the aftermath of slavery a propitious time to question the premium placed
on white, Western standards of beauty. Rather than view their blackness
as a badge of degradation, they should be encouraged to embrace it as a
symbol of strength and beauty, superior in many respects to the pale,
pasty-complexioned Caucasians. Not only was blackness a color borne by
their ancestors in Africa who had erected ancient and noble civilizations
but it characterized a majority of the peoples of the world. Through their
color, Afro-Americans could thus identify with the mass of mankind, "and
who shall dare say that the time will not come, when the idea of wealth,
power and intelligence will be associated with a dark skin, as it is now
associated with a white one?”

We are in the minority here, but we are the most numerous in the world
as a whole.... Of the so-called white [race] there are three hundred and
fifty million; of the brown there are five hundred and fifty million. So you
see that we thus have a majority of two hundred million. If we were to
raise the battle-cry of "Brown earth for brown men!” we could VOTE
them out of this mundane sphere, and send them to the ghostly world,
as not fit to live here . 84

If the call for "Brown earth for brown men!” was as yet premature, the
reality of black political power and even black majorities in the South was
not. Although blacks remained a numerical minority in all but two of the
ex-Confederate states, the acquisition of the ballot converted them in¬
stantly into a potent political force. Emboldened at the same time by a
growing sense of racial and community identity, blacks prepared to become

Becoming a People

545

full partners in the remaking of southern society—in a reconstruction that
promised to broaden the base of political participation and enable even an
ex-slave to aspire to the "'wealth, power and intelligence” long monopolized
by a coterie of white-skinned natives.

The largely black audience that gathered in Savannah on April 2,
1867, listened as a prominent white Georgian advised them to be skeptical
of any politician who tried to win their votes by telling them they were the
equals of the white race. "Politicians have been the bane of all people,” he
warned, "and they will be your bane if you fail to act wisely and well in
your new relations to the race which always has and always will be the
predominant race in the world we live in. To fit you for the exercise of
political rights you must be politically educated.” If the audience received
these remarks with a discernible lack of enthusiasm, they may have been
both troubled by the content and anxious to hear the next speaker, James
M. Simms, a preacher and former slave. No sooner had the former governor
of Georgia introduced him than the Reverend Simms proceeded to set
matters straight. White men, he declared, knew nothing of his people.
Under slavery, most blacks had learned to dissimulate in the presence of
their master, and he claimed to be no exception. But now, "for the first
time,” he no longer felt compelled to mask his views. No matter how
illiterate or politically uneducated black people might be, he assured the
crowd, they were not fools. As prospective voters, they knew enough to cast
their ballots for a party which had always advocated principles of liberty
and justice. Nor did they need to be "politically educated” to know not to
elect "a rebel mayor” who tolerated the presence of "brutal policemen.”

With considerable pride, the Reverend Simms alluded to the notable
changes of the last decade. His audience no doubt suspected what lay
behind the ardor with which the speaker now underscored his words.
Nearly sixteen years earlier, Thomas Simms, his brother, had been re¬
turned in chains from Massachusetts as a fugitive slave and dragged
through the streets of Savannah to the jail. Not far from that site, James
Simms now stood, sharing a platform with white dignitaries and advising
an assemblage made up largely of former slaves how to exercise their newly
won rights as free men and citizens. The transition in the lives of the
Simms brothers was no more extraordinary, however, than the political
era which this and scores of similar meetings helped to launch. Neither
white nor black spokesmen were oblivious to the implications. "Yes, we will
be a power that will be felt in this country for all time to come,” a black
newspaper proclaimed, while a former Confederate official admitted as
much as he surveyed the dim political scene: "The registration of voters
shows that the political power will be in the hands of our late slaves. What

546

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

shame! What humiliation for us. Would it not be better to take up arms and
defend ourselves to the last against such infamy.” 85

With the passage of the Reconstruction Acts in March 1867, what came
to be known as Radical or Congressional Reconstruction was under way.
Until a popularly elected convention had framed a constitution acceptable
to Congress, each of the unreconstructed southern states would remain
under military rule. What made this proposed reconstruction "radical”
was the stipulation that both races would vote for delegates to the conven¬
tions and no constitution would be acceptable unless it provided for black
suffrage. Throughout the South, boards of registrars, usually composed of
two whites and one black, began the process of enrolling qualified voters.
With thousands of whites unable to qualify because of their roles in the
Confederacy and still others refusing to register, the results were expected
but no less startling. Of the 1,363,000 registered voters in the forthcoming
elections, more than half of them—703,000—would be blacks, and they
formed a majority of the electorate in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Missis¬
sippi, and South Carolina. When these figures were translated into local
and county statistics, the results were sufficient to drive whites into even
deeper despair. "Registration has closed here placing the negroes in a
majority,” a white resident of Savannah informed a business client, who
was traveling in Europe. "I hope we shall be able to control them. If not,
what a terrible prospect! You will probably find us in the throes of that
revolution when you return.” 86

While canvassing Georgia and South Carolina for the Republican
Party, Henry M. Turner expressed grave concern over how many of his
people would exercise their new political power. The problem, as he dis¬
cerned it, was not so much political apathy as the "foolish idea” that
political involvement might compound their already precarious economic
situation. Rather than take such risks, they would leave political matters
to their "white friends and colored leaders.”

The result is that hundreds declare they will not register; others say, they
do not care to either register or vote until things are more settled; others,
again, say they cannot lose the time just now, crops are being laid by, and
for every day they lose, from three to five dollars are deducted from their
wages; while still others declare it is useless to register, for they have
already been told that if they ever vote in harmony with Congress, or old
Joe Brown, their throats will be cut from ear to ear ...

To encourage full participation in the forthcoming elections, the Reverend
Turner framed an urgent appeal to the "colored citizens” of Georgia and
ordered that it be read in every AME church. More importantly, he
proposed that the newly emerging black leadership in the state traverse
the countryside in an effort to mobilize and register the thousands of
freedmen not reached by urban rallies and newspapers. "What will it avail
us for the larger cities to go right if we are to be dragged down to infamy

Becoming a People

547

and shame by the rural districts.” And if the men remained indifferent to
these appeals, Turner urged black women, though disfranchised, to orga¬
nize themselves to help get out the vote. 87

From the outset of registration, black leaders had recognized the need
to educate their people to the uses of political power. With that objective
in mind, black activists canvassed their respective counties and states,
discussed with prospective voters the issues that should determine their
selection of candidates, warned them that a failure to exercise their newly
acquired rights might result in the forfeiture of those rights, and explained
to them the mechanics of voter registration. Everywhere he traveled in the
interior of South Carolina, Benjamin Franklin Randolph reported, he came
across hundreds of his people who were at a loss to know how to register
or vote, some of them the victims of "bad advice” and threats from their
employers. "A short comprehensive lesson will any where satisfy them,”
he added, though local whites often made it difficult if not perilous for him
to impart such instruction. (While canvassing these same districts the
following year, Randolph was assassinated.) In urging blacks to register, a
newspaper in Georgia framed its appeal in terms of black indebtedness to
the North and the Republican Party. But the New Orleans Tribune, which
no doubt would have seriously questioned any such obligations, chose to
frame the issues so that few freedmen could afford to ignore them. "The
vote is the means to reach the composition of juries, the dispensation of
education, the organization of the militia and the police force, in such a
manner that the interests of all races be represented and protected.” 88

Few prospective black voters needed any "political education” to rec¬
ognize that their best interests lay with the party which had made possible
their citizenship and franchise. But the candidates who might best advance
Republican principles while acting on issues of daily concern to blacks were
not so easily discerned. "They see clearly enough that the Republican party
constitutes their political life boat,” the Tribune observed. "But they claim
the right to select the captains whom they can trust.” In the many meet¬
ings called to mobilize support for the party, participants often utilized
such occasions to define their concerns and to draw up a platform on which
they expected candidates to run. Invariably, the demands included state-
supported public schools (preferably without racial distinctions), unre¬
stricted right of testimony, representation on juries, equal access to public
facilities, and legislation that would ameliorate the plight of landless agri¬
cultural laborers. 89 Reflecting regional concerns, a former slave asked a
political meeting in New Orleans to condemn the imminent introduction
of Chinese coolie labor into the cotton and sugarcane fields, warning that
such an immigration "will fill our jails, our lunatic asylums and our State
prisons.” In South Carolina, a black candidate coupled his opposition to
confiscation with a promise to tax lands in such a way as to force the owners
of large tracts to make some of that land available for purchase by freed¬
men. And when a black candidate in Georgia vowed to repeal taxes which
discriminated against small farmers, he had only to share his personal

548

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

experience with the audience. "Last year I rented a small farm of Dr.
Simmons, of this county. After paying him the rent, I had 5 bales of cotton.
On them I paid a tax of $15 a bale, making $75. It is needless for me to tell
poor men how much I have needed that money this year. It would have
breaded my family the whole year. I have felt its hardness/’ 90

Not since the weeks preceding secession had the South witnessed as
much intensive and enthusiastic political activity. But this time the partici¬
pants were people who had been politically voiceless, most of them only a
few years removed from slavery. When the Virginia Republican conven¬
tion got under way in the African Church in Richmond, more than three
thousand blacks waited outside to gain admittance, forcing party leaders
to move the next day’s session to Capitol Square. More important than any
head counts, however, was the spirit in which black participants entered
into these meetings, resembling in many instances the emotional fervor
and call-and-response techniques they brought to their religious gather¬
ings. More often than not, they heard what they had come to hear and
cheered their avowed champions, while making certain the candidates
understood their concerns. But if necessary, they revealed a political
shrewdness capable of unmasking any candidate, white or black, old
friends and professed converts alike. In Lebanon, Tennessee, a white Re¬
publican candidate and former slaveholder found his talk interrupted by
a freedman who demanded to know if he had freed his slaves uncondition¬
ally. No less insistent was a freedman in Charlottesville, Virginia, who
found unconvincing a candidate’s recital of his Unionist record and opposi¬
tion to secession. "While I believe a white man instantly who comes out
flat-footed and says he was for the war, when there is no profit nor advan¬
tage in his saying so; when I hear another say that he was against the war
... I cannot help suspecting him instantly.” And in Washington County,
Georgia, a white candidate quickly discovered that he had stretched the
credulity and patience of his audience too far when he sought to win them
over by advocating social equality even if that resulted in intermarriage;
the blacks shouted him down and refused to listen to the remainder of his
speech. With slightly more toleration, an assemblage made up largely of
freedmen listened to "a very intelligent, educated Negro” tell them that
most of his people were not yet prepared to exercise the suffrage and he
feared they would vote with their old masters as a way of gaining their good
will. Before the speaker could proceed, an elderly freedman asked to be
heard. "Every creature has got an instinct,” he explained, punctuating
each ofhis words. "The calf goes to the cow to suck, the bee to the hive. We’s
a poor, humble, degraded people, but we know our friends. We’d walk
fifteen miles in war time to find out about the battle; we can walk fifteen
miles and more to find how to vote.” 91

The overwhelmingly black participation in these meetings raised the
inevitable cry that the Republican Party in the South had become a "black
man’s party” in fact as well as in spirit. When Laura Towne, the white
schoolteacher, attended "a mass meeting of Republican citizens” in the Sea

Becoming a People

549

Islands, she was surprised to find only one white man on the platform and
few if any whites in the audience. Even white Republicans did not attend,
she noted; "they are going to have a white party, they say.” When one black
speaker indicated he wanted no whites on the platform, the others took him
to task for his intolerance. "What difference does skin make, my bredren,

I would stand side by side a white man if he acted right. We mustn t be
prejudiced against their color.” After some further verbal exchanges of this
kind, the assembled freedmen agreed that men should be judged by their
acts, not by their color, and they invited whites to join them at their next
meeting. When talk of a "black man’s party” began to circulate in Louisi¬
ana, no doubt inspired by the aggressive stance of the New Orleans colored
community, the black newspaper in St. Landry Parish recoiled at such a
prospect and suggested it would be tantamount to political suicide. Not
only would we be crushed in the attempt, in most of the Southern States,
but we may be sure the Northern States would not countenance our
plan.” 92

With white men—both Northerners (Carpetbaggers) and natives
(Scalawags)—assuming the prominent positions in the Republican Party,
while remaining dependent on their overwhelmingly black constituencies,
certain questions were bound to surface, and the talk of a black man s
party” only begins to suggest the dimensions of the problem. Forced in
every state to coalesce with whites, what price would black leaders be
willing to pay to maintain that coalition? Would the political influence they
wielded, the posts they held in the party, and the number of elective and
appointive offices they filled be commensurate with the electoral strength
of their people? On the eve of Radical Reconstruction, black leaders in some
instances acknowledged the need to defer to their more experienced and
better-educated white allies. If nothing else, the fear persisted that if blacks
pushed themselves too quickly into the center of the political arena, they
would confirm the worst fears of native whites, fracture the party, and
provoke a backlash in northern public opinion. When a leading clergyman
in the AME Church advised blacks to restrict their political aspirations, he
warned that "a colored ticket” would most likely turn thirty million white
people against them. And when one overly enthusiastic abolitionist sug¬
gested that a Negro be nominated for Vice-President of the United States,
many black leaders thought the proposal ill-timed and counterproductive.
While he wished "to see black men (or colored, if you prefer the term) in
every position socially and politically, attainable,” Martin Delany wrote
from South Carolina, such objectives need not be achieved at the cost of
destroying the Republican Party and uniting "the conservative Negro hat¬
ing elements North and South.” Like Delany, black leaders found initially
acceptable the maxim "Let us not attempt to reach the top of the tree
without climbing by means of the lower branches,” and thought it best to
curb their political aspirations, leaving the more prestigious and conspicu¬
ous places to their white allies. "What fuel that would be to feed the flame
of prejudice!” James H. Harris of North Carolina would declare in refusing

550

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

a nomination to Congress in 1868. T am not willing to sell out my race, for
such a sale would my acceptance virtually be.” 93

Whatever considerations prompted some blacks initially to refuse
nominations to public office, the projected political apprenticeship would
be short-lived. Within two years of the elections to the constitutional con¬
ventions, Martin Delany himself told a political rally in Congo Square, New
Orleans, that in every state in which blacks comprised a substantial por¬
tion of the electorate, "a pro rata of positions and places belong to them.”
That stand must have gratified those black spokesmen who from the very
outset had advocated proportional representation and had warned their
people not to concede anything to which their political strength entitled
them; in Louisiana, in fact, where the population was nearly evenly divided
between whites and blacks, the Republican Party in 1867 pledged itself to
reserve half of all nominations and appointive offices for blacks. 'That
plank is our protection against absorption and intrigue,” said the New
Orleans Tribune, "It is the safeguard of the destinies of the African race
in the State.” Nor did the Tribune have much patience with those who
argued for a delay ofblack political ambitions until they had acquired more
education and experience. No people possessed more experience and educa¬
tion in the meaning of oppression than former slaves, the Tribune editor
noted, and that fact alone would ensure democratic safeguards in any
constitution they helped to frame. 94

With the elections approaching, black canvassers and newspapers cau¬
tioned black voters about the critical importance of their political debut.
If the "black vote” became the means by which "unscrupulous renegades”
and "political vagrants” were elevated to office, the very legitimacy of this
experiment in biracial democratic government might be jeopardized. With¬
out wishing to reject the friendship and assistance of northern whites, the
New Orleans Tribune, among other black spokesmen, found little reason
to place any dependency on politicians who "cannot be so well informed as
to our wants as we are ourselves.” All too often, that same newspaper
warned, their "good friends” from the North came to them "not through
philanthropy, not for the affection they have for black men, but for the love
of power and spoils which is devouring them.” Such individuals invariably
took credit for emancipating the slaves, offered blacks a "tutorage” that
only perpetuated the dependency of slavery, and lavished praise on black
people only when able to control them. If a Union officer came to them
claiming their votes on the basis of his service in the war, the Tribune
asked black voters to "unbutton his uniform coat and feel the heart throbs
of the man within it.” If, on the other hand, a former Confederate officer
came to them professing to believe in Republican principles, the Tribune
advised black voters to be skeptical of such sudden conversions. "After a
five years’ struggle we do not choose to join the Confederates today.” And
finally, the Tribune suggested that if any candidate replied to their de¬
mands with the familiar refrain of "too soon,” it was to be interpreted as
"a lack of courage” to carry out the reform at any time.

Becoming a People

551

When will the right time come? Is it, per chance, after we will have
separated for ten or twenty years the two races in different schools, and
when we shall have realized the separation of this nation into two peo¬
ples? The difficulty, then, will be greater than it is today. A new order
of things, based on separation, will have taken root. It will, then, be TOO
LATE. 95

Despite the emphasis placed on racial unity, black leaders were hardly
immune to the usual political vices of sectarianism, dissimulation, and
unbridled ambition. Nor did they necessarily agree on what relations they
should sustain with the former slaveholding class or with their friends
from the North. The extent to which they intended to act as "race men”
if elected also tended to vary. Elick Mahaly, an ex-slave who ran for office
in Crawford County, Georgia, demonstrated little of the moral fervor that
could be found in the pages of the New Orleans Tribune or in the speeches
of such Georgia blacks as Henry M. Turner and Tunis G. Campbell. He
addressed himself almost exclusively to local agricultural problems and
pledged himself to reconcile the interests of his own race with the need to
ease the economic plight and political disabilities of the former slavehold¬
ing class. In offering himself to the voters in 1867, he played upon the
theme of reconciliation.

I was born a slave on the plantation of Benjamin Lockett, Warren county,

Miss. I remained with my old master until 1864, when I was brought to
Georgia and sold to Mr. Isaac Dennis. My old master raised me as well
as slaves are usually raised, giving me the rudiments of a common En¬
glish education, and instilling into my youthful mind the principles of
honesty and virtue. And I will say here, that I have never departed from
them.... I am in favor of reconstruction under the military bills; though,
if I am elected, I shall use my influence to have the disqualifications
removed from all. 96

But to have listened to the anguished cries of southern whites, the
disaster they anticipated could best be summed up in an individual like the
Reverend Nick Williams. This black preacher reportedly stormed through
the interior of South Carolina in 1867, inculcating the minds of the freed-
men with ideas subversive of the political and social order and bound to
provoke a racial conflagration. Although skeptical of Reconstruction ("Will
it put muskets in your hands or mine?”), he urged blacks to vote for none
but their own color. The rights of the planter class to their lands, he
declared, were no more legitimate than the previous rights they had
claimed to their slaves. "Land we must have or we will die,” and he ex¬
pected no help in this regard from the North. Any agent of the Freedmen’s
Bureau could be easily bought—for as little as $2.50. The Negro in the
North was treated no better than the slave in the South, perhaps even
worse, and he advocated a massive exodus of northern blacks to the south¬
ern states, where they would combine with the freedmen to establish their

552

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

own nation. That was the Reverend Williams’ message, at least as white
witnesses reported it. "No one can imagine, unless he was present among
us,” one such observer wrote, "the extent and character of the excitement
among the negroes. All labour is suspended; our fodder withers in the
fields; whilst crowds attend the reverend gentleman everywhere he goes.”
The district Freedmen’s Bureau office was sufficiently alarmed to dispatch
a detail of soldiers to arrest the Reverend Williams. 97

If Elick Mahaly and Nick Williams pointed up the broad spectrum of
black leadership and thought, the distinctions blurred in the minds of
many southern whites. The quality and opinions of the individual were far
less important than the nature of his aspirations. Whatever the range of
views expressed, the spectacle offreedmen deliberating, nominating candi¬
dates, organizing politically, and preparing to cast ballots was enough to
conjure up fearful images. "All society stands now like a cone on its Apex,
with base up,” a former governor of South Carolina observed on the eve of
Radical rule. After Josiah Gorgas viewed his first freedmen’s meeting, the
first black policeman in Selma, and blacks being sworn in as voters, this
prominent Alabaman and former Confederate officer could only brood
about the extraordinary effort "to convert the Southern States into a
Jamaica.” No less alarmed and incredulous were those southern whites
who saw in every political gathering of freedmen the specter of insurrec¬
tion. "Threats of an incendiary & seditious character have been made by
them,” the mayor of a North Carolina town dutifully reported to the Freed¬
men’s Bureau. "I am no alarmist, but I tell you in all sincerity that sooner
or later, I fear a conflict will occur between the two races down here.”
Usually, as in this case, the Bureau agent reported that his investigation
had failed to substantiate the charges. 98

When Republicans gathered for a state convention in Richmond, the
b lafk workers in the tobacco factories informed their employers that they
intended to stop work in order to attend the proceedings. About the same
time, John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, watched his laborers leave the
fields to listen to Radical speakers in town; every one of them, he noted,
had registered to vote, black registration in the district exceeded that of
whites, and he wondered "to what depths of humiliation are we Comeing.”
T.ilrp Bills, many planters who had barely survived the transition to free
labor now faced still further disruptions. After the freedmen had finally
been persuaded not to expect any land redistribution or forty acres and a
mule, the approach of the elections and constitutional conventions re¬
newed precisely that kind of speculation. "You cannot be sure of any thing
when Negro rule commences,” a South Carolina planter wrote two months
after passage of the Reconstruction Acts, "and I am making friends of the
Mammon of unrighteousness as fast as possible. I still believe we can hold
our own but the negroes will have to enjoy more of the fruits than be¬
fore.” 99 Once again, the Freedmen’s Bureau dispatched its agents to the
plantations to make clear to the laborers that the forthcoming constitu¬
tional conventions were powerless to effect any changes in the ownership

Becoming a People

553

of land. Still, despite even the denials of black leaders, many freedmen
revived their hopes, and the idea persisted among them that the conven¬
tions they were helping to elect would take steps to ease their plight by
making land available to them, whether through confiscation or taxa¬
tion. 100 Some planters, in fact, may have been uncertain whether they had
more to fear from the reactions of freedmen to still another betrayal of
expectations or from the possible attempts by the new governments to
gratify the demand for land.

Anticipating bad times, some whites appeared to invite the very worst
times, as if their only chance for salvation lay in some plunge into the very
depths of degradation. "Having reached bottom,” Henry W. Ravenel
confided to his diary in March 1867, "there is hope now that we may rise
again to the surface in course of time.” To expedite that ultimate triumph,
some were content to allow their assumptions about black inferiority to
work themselves out in public view. "Let the negroes alone,” a prominent
Charleston attorney advised, "give them the necessary amount of rope, let
them have their representatives, all black, in the Convention, let their
ignorance, incapacity, and excesses have full scope and accomplish its ends;
dont attempt to modify it, with white sauce; let it be all black, and it will
soon cure itself.” The day the first black men entered the halls of Congress,
William Heyward agreed, "then comes the revulsion,” and the Yankees
would no doubt be the first to deprive them of the ballot. "Such a Govern¬
ment as this cannot stand, and if when the next trial of the strength of
parties comes on, they are nearly equal, neither will be disposed to yield
to the other, then we may see another revolution.” 101

Before Radical Reconstruction had even begun, before a single black
person had announced his candidacy for any office, the white South rushed
to pronounce the entire experiment in biracial democratic government a
total failure. It made no difference how blacks might choose to use their
political power, even if they succeeded in establishing the most virtuous
and competent governments in the history of the South. The sentence had
already been handed down: this would be "the most galling tyranny and
most stupendous system of organized robbery that is to be met with in
history.” Nothing that any Radical legislature or constitutional convention
did in the next decade could have reversed this initial judgment. If the
white South feared anything, in fact, it was not the likelihood of black
failure but the possibility of black success. "There was one thing that the
white South feared more than negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incom¬
petency,” W. E. B. Du Bois would write, "and that was negro honesty,
knowledge, and efficiency.” Neither at the outset nor at the end of
Radical Reconstruction did whites deem corruption to be the essential
issue. If they could barely distinguish between one black leader and
another, they cared even less to distinguish between a corrupt govern¬
ment and an honest government. The issue was the right of black men to
participate in any government on any level. And the most terrifying pros¬
pect of all remained the possibility that these people might actually learn

554

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

the uses of political power. "If the negro is fit to make laws for the control
of our conduct and property,” a southern educator would warn some years
later, "he is certainly fit to eat with us at our tables, to sleep in our beds,
to be invited into our parlors, and to do all acts and things which a white
man may do.” 102

The fears and despair which gripped portions of the white population
drove them into the kinds of defensive preparations once associated with
rumors of slave insurrections. "No man lives now at his ease,” a resident
of Rockingham, North Carolina, confessed. "When he lies down at night,
although his doors and windows are locked and bolted, he puts his gun and
pistol, in readiness, not knowing at what hour he may be called upon to use
them.” For those who lived in counties or states with a preponderance of
blacks, the prospect ofblack majorities and black mayors, black legislators,
black magistrates, and black jurors was almost impossible to grasp and
precipitated frantic talk about migration. "What future can we look for¬
ward to for our children, different from what they would have, if they were
in Jamaica?” a resident of Winnsboro, South Carolina, asked. "To live in
a land where Free Negroes make the majority of the Inhabitants, as they
do in this unfortunate State of ours, is to me revolting.” 103

But most whites neither migrated nor panicked. Since they had once
guided the lives and thoughts of blacks as slaves, the assumption prevailed
in some circles—albeit uneasily—that they could now exploit the "old ties”
and the economic dependency of the freedmen to control them politically.
If black suffrage was forced upon whites, a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia,
warned, "we will take care to turn the African suffrages to other purposes
than those designed by the Republican agitators. The negroes will be in our
employ, under our care, and, if controlled by any, under our control.... We
give fair warning that we stoop to conquer.” With a certain degree of
confidence, then, some white Democrats addressed themselves directly to
the blacks in their vicinity, urging them not to abandon those who had
always cared for them, those who knew them intimately, and those with
whom their destiny lay. If they persisted in their political claims, however,
they should at least know the futility of it all.

It is impossible that your present power can endure , whether you use it for
good or ill ... Let not your pride, nor yet your pretended friends, flatter
you into the belief that you ever can or ever will, for any length of time,
govern the white men of the South. The world has never seen such a
spectacle, and its whole history, and especially the history of your race,
gives no ground for the anticipation.... Your present power must surely
and soon pass from you. Nothing that it builds will stand, and nothing
will remain of it but the prejudices it may create.

Although some black spokesmen derived satisfaction from the sight of
former slaveholders trying to win over the votes of former slaves, they did
not minimize the seriousness of the effort. "They basely flatter us in order

Becoming a People

555

to better betray us,” the New Orleans Tribune warned. "The deeper they
bow, the more their detestation and desire for revenge are growing in their
bosom.” 104

To consolidate any gains they might make among the freedmen, white
Democrats even urged groups of "conservative colored men” to organize
among themselves. Typical in this respect was a meeting in Montgomery,
Alabama, in which black speakers pledged themselves to support in the
forthcoming election "the policy of our own tried people, neighbors and
friends, whose capital furnishes us employment and whose roofs shelter us,
in preference to that inaugurated by strangers and their allies.” The ways
in which whites could assess the results of these efforts were easy enough.
If the blacks voted with them on election day, that would be a triumph. But
if they chose to remain at home, that would be sufficient. Less than a month
after noting that most of his laborers had registered to vote, a planter in
St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, exulted in what happened on election day:
"Not one of the negroes left here to go and vote today. This has been a
glorious day—All White!!!” 105

If verbal appeals failed to achieve the desired results, as so often
happened, southern whites fell back on the more effective weapons of
economic coercion, intimidation, and violence. Within weeks after the pas¬
sage of the Reconstruction Acts, for example, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent
in Sparta, Louisiana, requested a detachment of troops to protect the right
of laborers to register to vote. Far less could be done, however, to counter
the actions of employers who suddenly found they had no work for blacks
who evinced any active interest in politics.

This morning I discharged 3 of my hands.... I gave them from last
Monday until Saturday night to decide as to whether or not they would
vote. They being unwilling to give me a positive answer, I thereupon told

them I would dispense with their services-I retain two who promised

me last week without any parley that they would stay at the mill &
attend to their work.

With negotiations for new contracts coming in the wake of the first elec¬
tions, employers like William Gamble of Henry County, Alabama, simply
inserted a new clause which forbade the laborers to "attend elections or
political meetings” without his consent. The beatings meted out to black
voters, the assassination of black leaders, the intimidation of black candi¬
dates, and the breaking up of meetings suggested in 1867 some of the
techniques of terrorism that would be embellished in the next few years to
expedite the political emasculation of the freedmen. 106

Despite the threats and economic coercion, blacks voted in overwhelm¬
ing numbers in their first exercise of political power. On the eve of the
election, laborers from the surrounding countryside began to pour into the
towns, filling up the streets, attending last-minute rallies, marching in
torchlight parades—partaking, in other words, of the traditional election

556

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG

eve festivities they had once watched from a distance. The next morning,
lines formed outside the polling places as freedmen waited anxiously for
the moment when they would cast their first vote. With rumors circulating
that blacks expected to return from the polls with a mule and a deed to a
forty-acre lot, a reporter in one town thought to ask a freedman waiting
to vote whether he shared that expectation. "No Sah,” he replied scorn¬
fully. "I spect to get nuffin but what I works hard for, and when I’se sick
I’ll get docked.” If the lines were long and the process time-consuming,
many freedmen seemed in no hurry, as though they wished to prolong the
experience, some of them loitering around the polls long after they had
voted. Seldom did the freedmen standing in line speak to each other, a
reporter noted, apparently deeming silence more appropriate to the solem¬
nity and "sacred importance” of the occasion. Noticing one of his laborers
in line, an employer in Montgomery, Alabama, discharged him on the spot;
the freedman smiled, looked down, said nothing, and voted. 107

Except for a few sporadic skirmishes, election day in most of the South
passed quietly—and with it, some mistakenly thought, the old political and
social order.

Notes

Chapter One: "The Faithful Slave”

1. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
(New York, 1964), 92.

2. Orland Kay Armstrong, Old Mas -
sa’s People: The Old Slaves Tell Their Story
(Indianapolis, 1931), 200, 269.

3. Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary
from Dixie (ed. Ben Ames Williams; Boston,
1949), 38. For white perceptions of slave re¬
actions to the outbreak of the war, see also
Duncan Clinch Heyward, Seed from Mada¬
gascar (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1937), 130, and
William H. Russell, My Diary North and
South (Boston, 1863), 84. For slave recollec¬
tions of the bombardment of Fort Sumter,
see Armstrong, Old Massa’s People , 278.

4. Armstrong, Old Massa’s People,
276-77; George P. Rawick (ed.), The Ameri¬
can Slave: A Composite Autobiography (19
vols.; Westport, Conn., 1972), IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 2), 174, 227; VI: Ala. Narr., 56;
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 62,249; XVIII: Un¬
written History of Slavery (Fisk Univ.), 3,
198.

5. Rawick (ed.), American Slave , XIV:
N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 192. For a nearly identi¬
cal recollection, see IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1),
122 .

6. Ibid, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 171-
72; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 100; XII: Ga.
Narr. (Part 2), 277-78; Whitelaw Reid, After
the War: A Southern Tour ; May 1, 1865, to
May 1, 1866 (London, 1866), 52; Weymouth
T. Jordan, Hugh Davis and His Alabama
Plantation (University, Ala., 1948), 155-56;
Laura S. Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work:
Labors and Experiences (Cincinnati, 1881),
264. Unable to provide properly for their
own families, some planters bitterly pro¬
tested the burdens of slave maintenance.
See, e.g., Mary Ann Cobb to John B. Lamar,
Nov. 11, 1861, in Kenneth Coleman (ed.),
Athens, 1861-1865 (Athens, Ga., 1969), 28;
Rev. John Jones to Mrs. Mary Jones, Dec. 7,
1863, in Robert M. Myers (ed.), The Children
of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the

Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1121-22; and
Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 172, 243-44.

7. Letter from a slave to his mistress,
in Robert S. Starobin (ed.), Blacks in Bond¬
age: Letters of American Slaves (New York,
1974), 80-81; Francis B. Simkins and James
W. Patton, The Women of the Confederacy
(Richmond, 1936), 170-72; T. Conn Bryan,
Confederate Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1953),
132.

8. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 131; XVHI: Unwritten
History, 206; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 277.

9. Ibid, ID: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 48-50;
VII: Okla. Narr., 46, 312. See also V: Texas
Narr. (Part 3), 107, (Part 4), 97, 152; and
Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden,
and Robert K. Phillips (eds.), Weevils in the
Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves
(Charlottesville, 1976), 335.

10. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IX:
Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 169,174; IV: Texas Narr.
(Part 2), 29; XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 300; II:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 46. See also VI: Ala.
Narr., 97,226,404; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 8;
Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 316.

11. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI:
Ala. Narr., 129-32; John W. Blassingame
(ed.), Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Let¬
ters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiogra¬
phies (Baton Rouge, 1977), 660.

12. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVIII: Unwritten History, 14-15; XV: N.C.
Narr. (Part 2), 25.

13. Ibid, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 187;
Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An
Autobiography (New York, 1902), 12-13;
Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 539.

14. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, III:
S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 40; IV: Texas Narr. (Part
2), 100, V (Part 3), 260; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part
1), 218-19.

15. David Macrae, The Americans at
Home (Edinburgh, 1870; repr., New York,
1952), 209; J. T. Trowbridge, The South: A

558

Notes to pages 10-18

Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities,
A Journey Through the Desolated States,
and Talks with the People (Hartford, 1867),
68 .

16. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 135; VII: Miss. Narr.,
115; M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow,
Hampton and Its Students (New York,
1875), 110-11. See also Rupert S. Holland
(ed.), Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne:
Written from the Sea Islands of South
Carolina, 1862-1884 (Cambridge, 1912), 29.

17. Bell I. Wiley (ed.), Letters of
Warren Akin: Confederate Congressman
(Athens, Ga., 1959), 5; Mrs. William Mason
Smith to her family [Feb. 23,1864], in Daniel
E. Huger Smith et al. (eds.), Mason Smith
Family Letters, 1860-1868 (Columbia, S.C.,
1950), 83.

18. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 4), 192, 193-94.

19. Ibid., VII: Okla. Narr., 88-90.

20. Simkins and Patton, Women of the
Confederacy, 162; Bell I. Wiley, Southern
Negroes: 1861-1865 (New Haven, 1938), 51n.

21. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 52n.

22. E. C. BaU to W. J. Ball, July 23,
1863, Ball Family Papers, South Caro-
liniana Library, Univ. of South Carolina,
Columbia; Simkins and Patton, Women of
the Confederacy, 174.

23. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 14-16. See also Blassin-
game (ed.), Slave Testimony, 537.

24. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Okla. Narr., 135; New York Times, quoting
the Louisville correspondent of the Cincin¬
nati Commercial See also John K. Betters-
worth, Confederate Mississippi (Baton
Rouge, 1943), 163-64.

25. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 77-78; VI: Ala. Narr.,
224; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony,
535. See also Douglass*Monthly (Rochester,
N.Y.), IV (March 1862), 617; Perdue et al.
(eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 167; Starobin
(ed.), Blacks in Bondage, 77-83; and Charles
S. Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez
Region: Benjamin L. C. Wailes (Durham,
N.C., 1938), 302-03.

26. Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 125;
Wiley, Southern Negroes, 75-76.

27. Mrs. Mary Jones to Col. Charles C.
Jones, Jr., June 5,1863, in Myers (ed.), Chil¬

dren of Pride, 1068; Simkins and Patton,
Women of the Confederacy, 164; Russell, My
Diary North and South, 208-09.

28. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 158-
59; Kate Stone, Brokenbum: The Journal of
Kate Stone, 1861-1868 (ed. John Q. Ander¬
son; Baton Rouge, 1972), 298.

29. Simkins and Patton, Women of the
Confederacy, 164; Edmund Ruffin, The Di¬
ary of Edmund Ruffin (ed. William K. Scar¬
borough; 2 vols.; Baton Rouge, 1972,1976), I,
556-57. See also Russell, My Diary North
and South, 131-32.

30. Robert F. Durden, The Gray and
the Black: The Confederate Debate on Eman¬
cipation (Baton Rouge, 1972), 7-8; Russell,
My Diary North and South, 188.

31. Durden, The Gray and the Black,
14,168; John K. Bettersworth (ed.), Missis¬
sippi in the Confederacy: As They Saw It
(Baton Rouge, 1961), 249. See also Benjamin
Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston,
1953), 37,49-50; John E. Johns, Florida Dur¬
ing the Civil War (Gainesville, 1963), 174; E.
Merton Coulter, "Slavery and Freedom in
Athens, Georgia, 1860-66,” in Elinor Miller
and Eugene D. Genovese (eds.), Plantation,
Town, and County: Essays on the Local His¬
tory of American Slave Society (Urbana, Ill.,
1974), 352; Coulter, The Confederate States
of America (Baton Rouge/ 1950), 256.

32. Memorial of Free Negroes, Jan. 10,
1861, quoted in George D. Terry, "From Free
Men to Freedmen: Free Negroes in South
Carolina, 1860-1866,” seminar paper, Univ.
of South Carolina, Columbia. For examples
of free black support of the war, see also
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for Sept.
3,1861, Univ. of South Carolina; Henry Wil¬
liam Ravenel, The Private Journal of Henry
William Ravenel, 1859-1887 (ed. Arney R.
Childs; Columbia, S.C., 1947), 50; Betters¬
worth (ed.), Mississippi in the Confederacy,
249; and Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 131.
For the history of free blacks in the antebel¬
lum South, consult Ira Berlin, Slaves With¬
out Masters (New York, 1974).

33. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 174; James B. Sellers, Slavery in Ala¬
bama (University, Ala., 1950), 397-98.

34. Hope Summerell Chamberlain,
Old Days in Chapel Hill: Being the Life and
Letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1926), 131; Mrs. Nicholas Ware

Notes to pages 18-25

559

Eppes [Susan Bradford Eppes], The Negro of
the Old South (Chicago, 1925), 110; [Sallie A.
Putnam], In Richmond During the Confeder¬
acy (New York, 1867; repr. 1961), 179-80;
Emily Caroline Douglas, Ms. Autobiogra¬
phy, c. 1904, Emily Caroline Douglas Pa¬
pers, Louisiana State University, Baton
Rouge. See also Susan Dabney Smedes, Me¬
morials of a Southern Planter (ed. Fletcher
M. Green; New York, 1965), 184. For a de¬
scription of an unusual statue erected in
Fort Hill, South Carolina, dedicated to the
faithfulness of the slaves during the Civil
War, see Mason Crum, Gullah: Negro Life in
the Carolina Sea Islands (Durham, N.C.,
1940), 82.

35. Russell, My Diary North and
South, 119, 131-32, 233, 257-58.

36. Mrs. Anna Andrews to Mrs. Court¬
ney Jones, April 27,1862, Andrews Papers,
Duke University, Durham, N.C.

37. "Narrative of the Life and Adven¬
tures of Henry Bibb,” reprinted in Gilbert
Osofsky (ed.), Puttin' On Ole Massa (New
York, 1969), 66; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, XVIII: Unwritten History, 134.

38. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 56;
James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography, Di¬
ary and Correspondence (ed. Edward Everett
Hale; Boston, 1891), 286.

39. New York Times, Dec. 30, 1861,
Oct. 2, 1863; Henry Hitchcock, Marching
with Sherman: Passages from the Letters
and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock
(ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe; New Haven,
1927), 71.

40. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, re¬
printed in Frank Moore (ed.), Rebellion
Record (11 vols,; New York, 1861-68), IV
(Part IV), 10. For comparable slave re¬
sponses, see New York Times, Nov. 20,1861,
Dec. 1, 1862.

41. George W. Nichols, The Story of
the Great March from the Diary of a Staff
Officer (New York, 1865), 60; Chesnut, Diary
from Dixie, 158; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 291. See also
John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is:
1865-1866 (ed. Henry M. Christman; New
York, 1965), 174, and Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony, 383, 576.

42. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 159.

43. Douglass’Monthly, IV (Dec. 1861),
566. See also Bishop L. J. Coppin, Unwritten

History (Philadelphia, 1919), 64; Blassin¬
game (ed.), Slave Testimony, 616; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 4),
52-53; VIE: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 281; XV:
N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 199.

44. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Miss. Narr., 52; VIE: Ark. Narr. (Part 2),
122; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 64, 334; XV:
N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 229; XVIII: Unwritten
History, 113. See also VH: Okla. Narr., 2;
VII: Miss. Narr., 12; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part
2), 105.

45. Ibid., HE: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 52-
53; Elizabeth H. Botume, First Days
Amongst the Contrabands (Boston, 1893),
6-7; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 28. For a
different account of the "spelling-out” story,
see Work Projects Adm. (WPA), The Negro
in Virginia (New York, 1940), 44.

46. Washington, Up from Slavery, 8-9;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XIII: Ga.
Narr. (Part 4), 348. See also III: S.C. Narr.
(Part 4), 116; VI: Ala. Narr., 52; and Wiley,
Southern Negroes, 18n.

47. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 4), 42-43; XVH: Fla.
Narr., 178.

48. Ibid., VII: Okla. Narr., 117. See
also Wiley, Southern Negroes, 17.

49. Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences
of My Life in Camp: With the 33d United
States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volun¬
teers (Boston, 1904), 8; Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment
(Boston, 1869), 34, 217. For a discussion of
"The Sacred World of Black Slaves,” see
Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and
Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New
York, 1977), 3-80.

50. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 11. See also XVIII: Un¬
written History, 76.

51. Mrs. Octavia Victoria Rogers Al¬
bert, The House of Bondage, or Charlotte
Brooks and Other Slaves (New York, 1891),
55-56; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XII:
Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 258.

52. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 106-07;
Macrae, Americans at Home, 367.

53. Coppin, Unwritten History, 64-66;
Russell, My Diary North and South, 147;
Esther W. Douglass to Rev. Samuel Hunt,
Feb. 1,1866, American Missionary Assn. Ar-

560

Notes to pages 26-31

chives, Amistad Research Center, Dillard
University, New Orleans.

54. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony , 377; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XV: N.C. Narr. (Fart 2), 426.

55. New York Times, May 16, 1861,
also reprinted in Douglass’ Monthly, IV
(June 1861), 477; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 11. For slave
recollections of clandestine gatherings, see
also Albert, House of Bondage, 12; H. C.
Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-nine Years a
Slave, Twenty-nine Years a Free Man (York,
Pa., 1895; repr. New York, 1969), 99; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, TV and V: Texas Narr.
(Part 1), 199, (Part 3), 240-41, (Part 4), 43,
154; VI: Ala. Narr., 68; VIII: Ark. Narr.
(Part 1), 9; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 419.

56. Ravenel, Private Journal, 269;
Douglass’ Monthly, IV (July, Dec. 1861),
487, 564; New York Times, May 16, June 2,
7, Dec. 8,1861. After confirming the rumor
of a slave conspiracy nearby, Edmund Ruffin
confided to his diary on May 26, 1861, that
many slaves, "as in this case, have learned
that Lincoln’s election was to produce gen¬
eral emancipation—& of course, many
hoped for that, & since for northern military
carrying out of that measure.” Diary, II, 35.

57. Douglass’ Monthly, IV (June
1861), 477; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 19. See
also Bruce, New Man, 99-100; Washington,
Up from Slavery, 8; and Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony, 616.

58. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction (Wash¬
ington, D.C., 1866), Part II, 177. For exam¬
ples of how ex-slaves recalled the causes and
issues of the war, see Armstrong, Old Mas-
sa’s People, 265; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, VII: Miss. Narr., 40; XIII: Ga. Narr.
(Part 3), 101; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 317;
XVII: Fla. Narr., 292-93; Perdue et al. (eds.),
Weevils in the Wheat, 216; Blassingame
(ed.), Slave Testimony, 640.

59. L. G. C. [Causey] to husband [R. J.
Causey], Nov. 19,1863, R. J. Causey Papers,
Louisiana State Univ. For the strengthening
of patrol laws, see Wiley, Southern Negroes,
33-34. For the operation of the patrol sys¬
tem during slavery, see Kenneth M.
Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in
the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956),
214-15, and Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jor¬

dan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New
York, 1974), 617-19.

60. Brig. Gen. Richard Winter to Gov.
John J. Pettus, June 6, 1862, in Betters-
worth (ed.), Mississippi in the Confederacy,
77; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 36, 38; Rave¬
nel, Private Journal, 130; George C. Rogers,
Jr., The History of Georgetown County,
South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 406.

61. Johns, Florida During the Civil
War, 152; Ruffin, Diary, II, 35-36. See also
Putnam, Richmond During the Confederacy,
264-66; Richmond Dispatch, Nov. 13,1862,
quoted in New York Times, Nov. 23, 1862;
Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1152-53;
Jackson Daily Mississippian, April 15,1863,
in Bettersworth (ed.), Mississippi in the
Confederacy, 238-39; Bryan, Confederate
Georgia, 126. For efforts to restrict urban
blacks, see, e.g., E. Merton Coulter, "Slavery
and Freedom in Athens, Georgia, 1860-66,”
in Miller and Genovese (eds.), Plantation,
Town, and County, 344-50.

62. Bernard H. Nelson, "Legislative
Control of the Southern Free Negro, 1861-
1865,” Catholic Historical Review, XXXII
(April 1946), 28-46; Vernon L. Wharton, The
Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1947), 18; Bryan, Confederate
Georgia, 131; Louis H. Manarin (ed.), Rich¬
mond at War: The Minutes of the City Coun¬
cil, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), 346,
349; Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 376.

63. Nancy and D. Willard to Micajah
Wilkinson, May 15, 1862, Micajah Wilkin¬
son Papers, Louisiana State Univ.; Bryan,
Confederate Georgia, 128-27; Robert L.
Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy: The
Trans-Mississippi South, 1863-1865 (New
York, 1972), 257. For the way in which Col¬
lege Hill, a Presbyterian community in Mis¬
sissippi, dealt with a church member who
had killed a "defiant” slave, see Maud M.
Brown, "The War Comes to College Hill,”
Journal of Mississippi History, XVI (Jan.
1954), 28-30.

64. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 188.

65. Simkins and Patton, Women of the
Confederacy, 162.

66. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Okla. Narr., 217-18, 220-22.

67. Albert V. House, Jr. (ed.), "Deterio¬
ration of a Georgia Rice Plantation During
Four Years of Civil War,” Journal of South-

Notes to pages 31-38

561

em History ; IX (1943), 101-02; Louis Mani-
gault to "Mon Cher Pere” [Charles Mani-
gault], Nov. 24, Dec. 5,1861, South Carolina
Dept, of Archives and History, Columbia;
Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 216; D. E. Huger
Smith to Mrs. William Mason Smith, July
28,1863, in Smith et al. (eds.), Mason Smith
Family Letters, 57.

68. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 6-7; Ra-
wick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr.
(Part 1), 108; V (Part 3), 129; Simkins and
Patton, Women of the Confederacy, 174.

69. Albert, House of Bondage, 114-15;
Charles NordhofF, The Freedmen of South
Carolina: Some Account of Their Appear¬
ance, Character, Condition, and Peculiar
Customs [New York, 1863], 11-12; Mary
Williams Pugh to Richard L. Pugh, Nov. 9,
1862, in Katharine M. Jones (ed.), Heroines
of Dixie: Confederate Women Tell Their
Story of the War (Indianapolis, 1955), 184;
"Diary of John Berkley Grimbali, 1858-
1865,” South Carolina Historical Magazine,
INI (1955), 166-67. See also Douglass’
Monthly, IV (March 1862), 617; Henry L.
Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home: Letters from
Contraband Camps (Nashville, 1966), 42;
Walter Clark, The Papers of Walter Clark
(eds. Aubrey Lee Brooks and Hugh Talmage
Lefler; 2 vols.; Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948), 1,94;
Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman, 70.

70. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Okla. Narr., 221,338; IV and V: Texas Narr.
(Part 3), 150, (Part 2), 154-65. The Texas
(XV-V) and Arkansas (VTH-XI) Narratives
contain numerous recollections of the war¬
time migration. For a graphic description by
a young white woman, see Stone, Broken-
bum, 186-225. Still other accounts may be
found in Sir Arthur James Lyon Fremantle,
Three Months in the Southern States: April-
June, 1863 (New York, 1864), 82, 86, 87;
Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy, 255,
392-93; Jefferson D. Bragg, Louisiana in the
Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1941), 216-17;
Wiley, Southern Negroes, 4-6.

71. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, TV
and V: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 108, (Part 3), 30,
79-80; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 247.

72. Mary Williams Pugh to Richard L.
Pugh, Nov. 9, 1862, in Jones (ed.), Heroines
of Dixie, 184. See also Bragg, Louisiana in
the Confederacy, 217.

73. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 181-
82; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV and V:
Texas Narr. (Part 3), 129, (Part 2), 155.

74. Bayside Plantation Record, Louisi¬
ana, Part II, 1862-66, Southern Historical
Collection, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill; J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country:
The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-
1950 (Lexington, Ky., 1953), 214-15.

75. "Diary of John Berkley Grimbali,”
166-67, 213-14; House (ed.), "Deterioration
of a Georgia Rice Plantation,” 107; Henry
Yates Thompson, An Englishman in the
American Civil War: The Diaries of Henry
Yates Thompson, 1863 (ed. Christopher
Chancellor; New York, 1971), 113; Johns,
Florida During the Civil War, 152.

76. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 86-97.
For accounts of slave prices during the war,
see also Ruffin, Diary, II, 353, 466; Freman¬
tle, Three Months in the Southern States, 62;
Bettersworth, Confederate Mississippi, 167-
69; and Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 130-31.

77. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 4), 195; XVI: Va. Narr., 6;
Perdue et al. (eds.). Weevils in the Wheat, 39;
Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 497.

78. Montgomery Advertiser, quoted in
Douglass’ Monthly, IV (Sept. 1861), 526;
ibid., IV (July 1861), 481.

79. James H. Brewer, The Confederate
Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military
Laborers, 1861-1865 (Durham, N.C., 1969);
Wiley, Southern Negroes, 110-15; Coulter,
Confederate States of America, 258; Charles
B. Dew, Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Jo¬
seph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron
Works (New Haven, 1966), 250; WPA, Negro
in Virginia, 193; Ruffin, Diary, H, 20; New
York Times, Feb. 11,1864.

80. Richmond Examiner, quoted in
New York Times, Oct. 16, 1864. For the
efforts to mobilize black manpower for the
Confederate war effort, see Brewer, Confed¬
erate Negro, 6-11, 139-40; Wiley, Southern
Negroes, 114-22; Coulter, Con federate States
of America, 258-59; Bettersworth, Confeder¬
ate Mississippi, 81-82; Bragg, Louisiana in
the Confederacy, 218; Bryan, Confederate
Georgia, 132-33; Johns, Florida During the
Civil War, 151; Kerby, Kirby Smith’s
Confederacy, 56-57, 254-55; Ravenel, Pri¬
vate Journal, 46, 50, 96.

562

Notes to pages 38-43

81. Wiley (ed.), Letters of Warren
Akin, 33; Coulter, Confederate States of
America, 259. For an owner who willingly
sent her carriage driver for service on fortifi¬
cations, see Mary Ann Cobb to F. W. C. Cook,
July 12, 1864, in Coleman (ed.), Athens,
1861-1865, 94-95.

82. Brewer, Confederate Negro, 153-
55; "Diary of Benjamin L. C. Wailes,” quoted
in Bettersworth (ed.), Mississippi in the
Confederacy, 225-26. For conditions among
the black military laborers, see also Wiley,
Southern Negroes, 123-31; Bettersworth,
Confederate Mississippi, 169-70; Bryan,
Confederate Georgia, 133; Perdue et al.
(eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 325; New York
Times, Sept. 6, 1863; New York Tribune,
Jan. 26, 1865.

83. Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 132;
Wiley, Southern Negroes, 124-25, 131-33;
Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 275; Perdue
et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 325.

84. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 132; Ra-
wick (ed.), American Slave, IX: Ark. Narr.
(Part 4), 182.

85. Jacob Stroyer, "My Life in the
South,” in William Loren Katz (ed.), Five
Slave Narratives (New York, 1969), 35-36,
81-97.

86. Stephen Moore to Rachel Moore,
July 8,1862, Thomas J. Moore Papers, Univ.
of South Carolina. For the life of the body
servant, see also Armstrong, Old Massa’s
People, 282-91; WPA, Negro in Virginia,
193; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the
Wheat, 167; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 583; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 154-55; IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 2), 188-89; VI: Ala. Narr., 313-
14; VII: Miss. Narr., 27-28; XU and XIII: Ga.
Narr. (Part 2), 107-08,325-26, (Part 3), 272;
Wiley, Southern Negroes, 134-42.

87. Armstrong, Old Massa’s People,
281; John F. Stegeman, These Men She
Gave: The Civil War Diary of Athens,
Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1964), 39-40; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, III: S. C. Narr. (Part
3), 154. See also Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Di¬
ary, entry for Oct. 14,1862, Univ. of South
Carolina.

88. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 193;
Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 288-89,
295-99; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, III: S.

C. Narr. (Part 4), 3; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2),
181; VII: Miss. Narr., 28; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part
2), 326; XTV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 115-16; Per¬
due et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 196;
Putnam, Richmond During the Confederacy,
178-79; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 143-45.

89. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 278; Spencer B. Ki n g,
Jr. (ed.), Rebel Lawyer: Letters ofTheodorick
W. Montfort, 1861-1862 (Athens, Ga., 1965),
69, 77; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 141. See
also New York Times, Sept. 30, 1862, Sept.
16,1863, and Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in
the Wheat, 168.

90. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 143n.;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 2), 188-89.

91. Montgomery Weekly Mail, Sept. 2,
1863, as quoted in Durden, The Gray and the
Black, 32.

92. Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Pha¬
lanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the
United States in the Wars of 1775-1812,
1861-65 (Hartford, 1888), 482; Wiley,
Southern Negroes, 147-48n.; Gerald M. Cap¬
ers, Occupied City: New Orleans under the
Federals, 1862-1865 (Lexington, Ky., 1965),
216-17; John W. Blassingame, Black New
Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago, 1973), 33-34;
Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 38; James
M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War (New
York, 1965), 23-24.

93. McPherson, Negro’s Civil War, 24;
Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 39; Dudley
T. Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in
the Union Army, 1861-1865 (New York,
1956), 67, 142.

94. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 203-
04; New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 3,1864. For
the debate on slave enlistments, see Durden,
The Gray and the Black, especially 29-100.

95. Durden, The Gray and the Black,
89, 95, 118-19; Wiley, Southern Negroes,
156-57; McPherson, Negro’s Civil War, 244.
See also Fremantle, Three Months in the
Southern States, 282n.; Wiley (ed.), Letters
of Warren Akin, 32-33; Ravenel, Private
Journal, 201; New York Times, Sept. 12,
1863; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 152,154-57;
Coulter, Confederate States of America,
267-68; Bettersworth, Confederate Missis¬
sippi, 170-71; Bryan, Confederate Georgia,
133-34.

Notes to pages 44-50

563

96. Durden, The Gray and the Black ,
76; Wiley (ed.), Letters of Warren Akin, 117;
Brooks and Lefler (eds.). Papers of Walter
Clark, 1,140.

97. Durden, The Gray and the Black,
202-03; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 158-59;
John S. Wise, The End of an Era (Boston,
1902), 394-95.

98. New York Tribune, April 4, 1865;
Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 456.

99. Richmond Examiner, Feb. 27,
1865, quoted in New York Times, March 5,
1865.

100. New York Times, Jan. 1, 1865;
Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman, 128;
Milo M. Quaife (ed.), From the Cannon's
Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Al-
pheus S. Williams (Detroit, 1959), 371.

101. Durden, The Gray and the Black,
44; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 160-61; Allan
Nevins, The War for the Union: The Orga¬
nized War to Victory, 1864-1865 (New York,
1971), 278-79; Trowbridge, The South: A
Tour, 208. For periodic reports ofblack "sol¬
diers” in the Confederate Army, see New
York Times, Aug. 17, 1861, Oct. 27, 1862,
March 1,14, May 14,1863, March 23,1865.

102. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 134; XVI: Tenn. Narr.,
12-13.

103. Douglass' Monthly, IV (June
1861), 477; New York Times, May 21, Dec.
15, 1861; House (ed.), "Deterioration of a
Georgia Rice Plantation,” 101; Sydnor, A
Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, 296;
Bettersworth, Confederate Mississippi, 162.

104. Douglass' Monthly, IV (June
1861), 477; New York Times, May 11, 21,
June 1, Dec. 15,1861; Haviland, A Woman's
Life-Work, 295-97; "Diary of Benjamin L. C.
Wailes,” in Bettersworth (ed.), Mississippi in
the Confederacy, 234-35; Sydnor, A Gentle¬
man of the Old Natchez Region, 296-97;
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave
Revolts (New York, 1943), 363-65; Ap¬
theker, "Notes on Slave Conspiracies in Con¬
federate Mississippi,” Journal of Negro
History, XXIX (Jan. 1944), 75; Harvey Wish,
"Slave Disloyalty under the Confederacy,”
Journal of Negro History, XXm (Oct. 1938),
443; Bettersworth, Confederate Mississippi,
162; Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 127;
Ruffin, Diary, II, 35.

105. Cassville (Ga.) Standard, quoted
in New York Times, May 31, 1861; R uffin ,
Diary, H, 35; Nancy and D. Willard to Mica-
jah Wilkinson, May 28, 1861, Micajah Wil¬
kinson Papers, Louisiana State Univ.; Wi¬
ley, Southern Negroes, 82.

106. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, en¬
try for Sept. 29, 1862, Univ. of South
Carolina; Aptheker, "Notes on Slave Con¬
spiracies in Confederate Mississippi,” 77.

107. Julia LeGrand, The Journal of
Julia LeGrand (eds. Kate M. Rowland and
Mrs. Morris E. Croxall; Richmond, 1911),
58-59. On Jan. 1,1863, she wrote: "The long
expected negro dinner did not come off.”
Ibid., 61. For rumors of a general insurrec¬
tion, see also Wish, "Slave Disloyalty under
the Confederacy,” 445-46; Wiley, Southern
Negroes, 82-83.

108. New York Times, Jan. 25,1863; L.
G. C. [Causey] to her husband [R. J. Causey],
Nov. 19, 1863, R. J. Causey Papers, Louisi¬
ana State Univ.

109. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 68; Ap¬
theker, "Notes on Slave Conspiracies in Con¬
federate Mississippi,” 78-79; Elijah P.
Marrs, Life and History of the Rev. Elijah P.
Marrs (Louisville, 1885), quoted in McPher¬
son, Negro's Civil War, 206-07. For a con¬
spiracy by slaves near Laurinburg, North
Carolina, to force themselves into the Union
lines, see David P. Conyngham, Sherman's
March Through the South (New York,
1865), 355.

110. "Memorial to the Senate and
House of Representatives of Georgia,” Pro¬
ceedings of the Freedmen '$ Convention of
Georgia, Assembled at Augusta, January
10th, 1866 (Augusta, 1866), 18. For punish¬
ments meted out to suspected insurrection¬
ists, see Bettersworth, Confederate Mis¬
sissippi, 162-63; Sydnor, A Gentleman of the
Old Natchez Region, 296-97; Wiley, South¬
ern Negroes, 68,82; Aptheker, American Ne¬
gro Slave Revolts, 365-67; New York Times,
Oct. 21,1862, Oct. 29,1863; John D. Winters,
The Civil War in Louisiana (Baton Rouge,
1963), 307; Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 127.

111. Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 248.

112. Ibid., 248; Christian Recorder
(Philadelphia), June 28, 1862; Anglo-Afri¬
can, Sept. 21,1861.

564

Notes to pages 50-53

113. Susan E. Jervey and Charlotte St.
J. Ravenel, Two Diaries: From Middle St
John's , Berkeley, South Carolina, February-
May, 1865 (St. John’s Hunting Club, 1921;
copy in South Caroliniana Library, Univ. of
South Carolina), 7, 18; Durden, The Gray
and the Black, 56. See also William G. Eliot,
The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slav¬
ery to Freedom, March 30, 1863 (Boston,
1885), 46; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 359; Ruffin, Diary, II, 409-10; Charles
E. Cauthen (ed.), Family Letters of the Three
Wade Hamptons, 1782-1901 (Columbia,
S.C., 1953), 102; Nordhoff, Freedmen of
South Carolina, 12; Oscar 0. Winther (ed.),
With Sherman to the Sea: The Civil War Let¬
ters, Diaries & Reminiscences of Theodore F.
Upson (Bloomington, Ind., 1958), 73; John
W. Hanson, Historical Sketch of the Old
Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers
(Boston, 1866), 162; John Beatty, The Citi¬
zen-Soldier; or Memoirs of a Volunteer (Cin¬
cinnati, 1879), 132; New York Times, June

13, 1861, Nov. 3, 1862, May 9, 11, 1863,
March 7, 1864, March 16, 1865; Wiley,
Southern Negroes, 76-77; Wish, '"Slave Dis¬
loyalty under the Confederacy,” 446-47; Al¬
lan Nevins, The War for the Union: The
Organized War, 1863-1864 (New York,
1971), 415. For blacks as Union spies, see,
e.g., WPA, Negro in Virginia, 199-200, and
McPherson, Negro's Civil War, 147-49.

114. McPherson, Negro's Civil War,
150-53; John V. Hadley, Seven Months a
Prisoner; or Thirty-six Days in the Woods
(Indianapolis, 1868), 84; Wharton, Negro in
Mississippi, 21.

115. James M. Guthrie, Camp-Fires of
the Afro-American (Cincinnati [1899]), 306-
16; Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 71-74;
Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in
South Carolina During Reconstruction,
1861-1877 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965), 6-7;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for May

14, 1862, Univ. of South Carolina. For the
subsequent testimony of Smalls before the
American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission
in 1863, see Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 373-79.

116. New York Times, June 2, 1861;
Friends’ Central Committee for the Relief of
the Emancipated Negroes, Letters from Jo¬
seph Simpson (London, 1865), 23.

117. Douglass' Monthly, IV (July
1861), 487; New York Times, May 27,1861;
WPA, Negro in Virginia, 188-89; Willie Lee
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction (Indian¬
apolis, 1964), 13-15; Louis S. Gerteis, From
Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy To¬
ward Southern Blacks, 1861-1865 (West-
port, Conn., 1973), 11-17; Wiley, Southern
Negroes, 175-76; Nevins, War for the Union:
The Organized War, 1863-1864, 421-23;
C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in
Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1976),
25-39.

118. Simkins and Patton, Women of
the Confederacy, 163; Wiley, Southern
Negroes, 9-10; New York Times, Nov. 20,

1861, May 7, 1864; Bettersworth, Confeder¬
ate Mississippi, 164; Bragg, Louisiana in the
Confederacy, 210; Blassingame, Black New
Orleans, 26, 28; Johns, Florida During the
Civil War, 63; Douglass' Monthly, IV (Dec.
1861), 565-66; Botume, First Days Amongst
the Contrabands, 78.

119. Douglass' Monthly, IV (Sep.
1861), 526; Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 178-80; Armstrong and Lud¬
low, Hampton and Its Students, 111; Havi-
land, A Woman's Life- Work, 270; A. O. How¬
ell, Jan. 19 and Feb. 6, 1864, American
Missionary Assn. Archives; James E. Gla¬
zier to his parents, Feb. 28, 1862, Glazier
Collection, Huntington Library, San
Marino, Calif.; Ephraim M. Anderson, Mem¬
oirs: Historical and Personal (St. Louis,
1868), 364; Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
957, 959; J. H. Easterby (ed.), The South
Carolina Rice Plantation: As Revealed in
the Papers of Robert F W. Alls ton (Chicago,
1945), 289-90; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Tes¬
timony, 449-54, 456, 545-46; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part 3),
276; VHI: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 169; William¬
son, After Slavery, 6; New York Times, June
15, Oct. 27, Dec. 18,1861, Jan. 14,19, Feb. 9,
Oct. 26, Dec. 16, 1862, March 9, June 26,
July 12, Aug. 8, Nov. 10,1863, May 7,1864,
March 2,1865.

120. Quarles, Negro in the Civil War,
62; New York Times, Dec. 20,1861, Nov. 15,

1862, May 7,1864; Blassingame (ed.). Slave
Testimony, 545; Winters, Civil War in Loui¬
siana, 163, Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 11-12.

Notes to pages 54-64

565

121. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 92-
93; Letters from Joseph Simpson, 22; Higgin-
son, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 71,246;
Haviland, A Woman's Life-Work, 270-71;
Stone, Brokenburn, 202; Swint (ed.), Dear
Ones at Home, 251; Bryan, Confederate
Georgia, 128; New York Times, Dec. 26,
1861, Jan. 21, Feb. 9, Oct. 19, Nov. 29,1862,
June 14,17, July 3,12,1863, July 17,1864,
April 2, 17, 1865; Blassingame (ed.), Slave
Testimony, 450-51.

122. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
929-30, 934-35, 935, 939-40.

123. Rogers, History of Georgetown
County, 406-07.

124. Easterby (ed.), South Carolina
Rice Plantation, 199-200, 289-90, 291-92,
292-93. Having reached similar conclusions
about defecting slaves, Edmund Ruffin could
rationalize his son’s decision to sell twenty-
nine of those who had remained. ‘These
were the fragments of sundry families, of
which the other members had gone off in the
several previous elopements—& who were
therein active participators, as all the adults
who remained were passive, knowing well
the intentions of the others, & keeping their
secret.” Ruffin, Diary, II, 353.

125. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 138-39,140; New York Times,
Dec. 12,1862; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in
the Wheat, 64; Rose, Rehearsal for Recon¬
struction, 110. See also Ravenel, Private
Journal, 115-16.

126. Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 247; Thompson, An Englishman
in the American Civil War, 104; Ray Allen
Billington (ed.), The Journal of Charlotte L.
Forten (New York, 1953), 160.

127. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 3), 83; Aptheker, Ameri¬
can Negro Slave Revolts, 360-61.

128. John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and
the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil
War (New York, 1907; repr. 1969), 2; Emily
Caroline Douglas, Ms. Autobiography, c.

1904, [167-68], Louisiana State Univ.; New
York Times, Dec. 18, 1861. See also Blas¬
singame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 173-74,
359.

129. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home,
42; New York Times, June 16,1861, Jan. 14,
April 6, Dec. 16,1862. See also Blassingame
(ed.), Slave Testimony, 699-702, and Albert,
House of Bondage, 114-15.

130. Towne, Letters and Diary, 24;
Letters from Joseph Simpson, 26; P. J. Stau-
denraus (ed.), “A War Correspondent’s View
of St. Augustine and Femandina: 1863,”
Florida Historical Quarterly, XLI (July
1962), 64; Julius Lester, To Be a Slave (New
York, 1968), 29. See also Armstrong and Lud¬
low, Hampton and Its Students, 110-11;
Haviland, A Woman's Life-Work, 268;
Botume, First Days Amongst the Contra¬
bands, 139; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VHI: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 169; XVTH: Un¬
written History, 173.

131. New York Times, Dec. 18, 1861;
Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment,
174; Albert, House of Bondage, 134-35.

132. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XTV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 450; Douglass'
Monthly, IV (Dec. 1861), 564.

133. Stone, Brokenburn, 28.

134. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 138,
139-40, 145-48, 151-52, 154, 176, 264-65.

135. Wise, End of an Era, 74; Speech
of James McDowell, Jr. (of Rockbridge) in
the House of Delegates of Virginia, on the
Slave Question (Richmond, 1832), reprinted
in Eric Foner (ed.), Nat Turner (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 113. On January 4, 1862,
Edmund Ruffin confided his recollections of
the Nat Turner insurrection to his diary.
Diary, II, 207-09.

136. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 38,
292-93.

137. Jones (ed.), Heroines of Dixie,

118.

138. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 189.

Chapter Two: Black Liberators

1 . Report of the Proceedings of a Meet- into Consideration the Condition of the

ing Held at Concert Hall, Philadelphia, on Freed People of the South (Philadelphia,
Tuesday Evening, November 3,1863, to Take 1863), 22.

566

Notes to pages 64-73

2. George H. Hepworth, The Whip,
Hoe, and Sword; or, The Gulf-Department in
*63 (Boston, 1864), 179.

3. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruc¬
tion (New York, 1935), 110.

4. Christian Recorder, April 23, May
28,1864.

5. Douglass' Monthly, HI (May 1861),

451.

6. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 301; New
York Times, Oct. 18,1862.

7. Roy P. Easier (ed.), The Collected
Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols.; New
Brunswick, N.J., 1953), V, 423; V. Jacque
Voegeli, Free but Not Equal: The Midwest
and the Negro During the Civil War
(Chicago, 1967), 99; Bell I. Wiley, The Life of
Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the
Union (Indianapolis, 1951), 120.

8. William C. Bryant II (ed.), "A Yan¬
kee Soldier Looks at the Negro,” Civil War
History, VH (1961), 144.

9. Cornish, Sable Arm, 9-10,31; Chris¬
tian Recorder, July 25,1863.

10. Christian Recorder, Jan. 31,1863.

11. Herbert Aptheker, "The Negro in
the Union Navy,” Journal of Negro History,
XXXn (1947), 169-200 (for the experience of
Robert Fitzgerald in the Union Navy, see
Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an
American Family (New York, 1956), 130-
34); Cornish, Sable Arm, 33-58, 69-75; Wil¬
liam F. Messner, "Black Violence and White
Response: Louisiana, 1862,” Journal of
Southern History, XLI (1975), 28-30; Doug¬
lass' Monthly, V (Aug. 1862), 698-99; Wil¬
son, Black Phalanx, 145-65; Rose,
Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 144-48,187-
89; Towne, Letters and Diary, 41-54.

12. James M. McPherson, The Strug¬
gle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro
in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Prince¬
ton, N.J., 1964), 197-202; Higginson, Army
Life in a Black Regiment, 4.

13. Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 4-5, 10-11,16-19, 25, 28-30.

14. E. Pershine Smith to Henry C.
Carey, Jan. 5, 1863, Carey Papers, Edward
Carey Gardiner Collection, Historical Soci¬
ety of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Winther
(ed.), With Sherman to the Sea, 55.

15. Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 58-60; Higginson to Brig. Gen.

Rufus Saxton, Feb. 1, 1863, in Guthrie,
Camp-Fires of the Afro-American, 390-91.

16. Lary C. Rampp, "Negro Troop Ac¬
tivity in Indian Territory, 1863-1865,”
Chronicles of Oklahoma, XLVH (Spring
1969), 534-36; New York Times, Nov. 20,
1862; Henry T. Johns, Life with the Forty-
ninth Massachusetts Volunteers (Washing¬
ton, D.C., 1890), 248, 281-83; McPherson
(ed.), Negro's Civil War, 185-87. See also
New York Times, Feb. 23, April 1, Dec. 14,
1863; William Wells Brown, The Negro in
the American Rebellion (Boston, 1880), 167-
76; Albert, House of Bondage, 131-32.

17. Cornish, Sable Arm, 95, 114, 231,
251; Nevins, War for the Union: The Orga¬
nized War, 1863-1864, 54n.; John W. Blas-
singame, "The Recruitment of Colored
Troops in Kentucky, Maryland and Mis¬
souri, 1863-1865,” Historian, XXIX (1967),
533-45; Basler (ed.), Collected Works of
Abraham Lincoln, VII, 282; McPherson
(ed.), Negro's Civil War, 192. See also Chris¬
tian Recorder, Oct. 31, 1863.

18. Cornish, Sable Arm, 229-31; Wil¬
son, Black Phalanx, 163-64. For examples
of changing attitudes toward the use of
black troops, see also Basler (ed.), Collected
Works of Abraham Lincoln, V, 357, and VI,
149-50; John Mercer Langston, From the
Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol
(Hartford, 1894), 205-11; Voegeli, Free but
Not Equal, 105.

19. Record of Action of the Convention
Held at Poughkeepsie, N Y., July 15th and
16th, 1863, for the Purpose of Facilitating
the Introduction of Colored Troops into the
Service of the United States (New York,
1863), 6, 7, 8; Douglass' Monthly, V (March
1863), 801, (April 1863), 819; New York
Times, Jan. 11, 1864. See also Christian
Recorder, July 18, 1863; New York Times,
Feb. 20, March 26,1864; H. Ford Douglass to
Frederick Douglass, Jan. 8, 1863, in Doug¬
lass' Monthly, V (Feb. 1863), 786; Blassin-
game (ed.), Slave Testimony, 372.

20. Christian Recorder, June 20,1863.
See also ibid., June 27, July 11, 18, 1863;
Douglass' Monthly, V (April 1863), 818-19,
(Aug. 1863), 852.

21. Douglass' Monthly, V (Aug. 1863),
851, (April 1863), 818.

22. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 306; New
York Times, July 27, 31, Aug. 2, 1863.

Notes to pages 74-83

567

23. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 306-07;
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 269-70;
George H. Gordon, A War Diary of Events in
the War of the Great Rebellion, 1863-1866
(Boston, 1882), 275.

24. New York Times, April 4, 1864;
Wilson, Black Phalanx, 130-32; John Hope
Franklin (ed.), The Diary of James T. Ayers:
Civil War Recruiter (Springfield, Ill., 1947),
xvi, 5, 26-8; McPherson, Negro's Civil War,
206.

25. Wilson, Black Phalanx, 130-32;
Blassingame, "Recruitment of Colored
Troops in Kentucky, Maryland and Mis¬
souri, 1863-1865/’ 543-44; Henry G. Pear¬
son, The Life of John A. Andrew: Governor
of Massachusetts, 1861-1865 (2 vols.; Bos¬
ton, 1904), II, 144-45; Cornish, Sable Arm,
182; Franklin (ed.), Diary of James T. Ayers,
46.

26. John A. Hedrick to Benjamin S.
Hedrick, March 13, 1864, Benjamin S. He¬
drick Papers, Duke Univ.; McPherson, Ne¬
gro's Civil War, 170; Blassingame,
"Recruitment of Colored Troops in Ken¬
tucky, Maryland and Missouri, 1863-1865,”
539.

27. Elizabeth Ware Pearson (ed.), Let¬
ters from Port Royal (Boston, 1906), 177,
185-90, 239,282-84; Towne, Letters and Di¬
ary, 107; Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruc¬
tion, 266-68, 269, 328-29; New York Times,
Jan. 25, 1863, March 1, 1865; Bruce, The
New Man, 107; Wiley, Southern Negroes,
309-10; Report of the Proceedings of a Meet¬
ing, Philadelphia, November 3, 1863, 22.

28. Pearson (ed.), Letters from Port
Royal, 185; Salmon P. Chase to David
Hunter, Feb. 14, 1863, Main File, Hunting-
ton Library.

29. New York Times, March 1, 1863;
Christian Recorder, July 18, 1863.

30. Christian Recorder, Feb. 28, July
11, 1863. See also Record of Action of the
Convention Held at Poughkeepsie, N Y., July
15th and 16th, 1863, 11-12.

31. Pearson, Life of John Andrew, II,
71-84; Luis F. Emilio, History of the Fifty-
fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer
Infantry, 1863-1865 (Boston, 1891), 1-18;
Cornish, Sable Arm, 105-10; McPherson,
Struggle for Equality, 202-06; Douglass'
Monthly, V (March 1863), 801.

32. Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth

Regiment, 19-34; Pearson, Life of John An¬
drew, II, 86-89; Cornish, Sable Arm, 147-48;
McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 206;
Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 10-12;
Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of
Martin R. Delany (Boston, 1883), 145; New
York Times, May 29, 1863.

33. Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth
Regiment, 67-104; Brown, Negro in the
American Rebellion, 198-211; McPherson,
Struggle for Equality, 211-12; Lewis Doug¬
lass to Amelia Loguen, July 20,1863, Carter
G. Woodson Collection, Library of Congress.

34. New York Times, May 24, 1863.

35. McPherson, Negro's Civil War,
143-44,173; William H. Parham to Jacob C.
White, Aug. 7,1863, Jacob C. White, Jr., Pa¬
pers, American Negro Historical Society Pa¬
pers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

36. Christian Recorder, July 26,1862.

37. Cornish, Sable Arm, 184-85;
Christian Recorder, June 11, 1864; Doug¬
lass'Monthly, V (March 1863), 801.

38. Christian Recorder, Aug. 13, April
2, 1864. See also ibid, March 5, June 11,
July 23, 1864.

39. Ibid, Aug. 13, Feb. 13, March 5,
19, 1864; Rollin, Life and Public Services
of Martin R. Delany, 146-54; Douglass'
Monthly, V (Aug. 1863), 849; Life and Times
of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, 1882), 421.

40. Life and Times of Frederick Doug¬
lass, 421-25.

41. Christian Recorder, March 5,
April 23, July 30, Aug. 27, 1864. For life in
the camp and the grievances of black sol¬
diers, as expressed in letters from the sol¬
diers, see Christian Recorder for 1863 and
1864.

42. Ibid, Feb. 20, March 5, April 23,
June 11, Aug. 13,1864.

43. Ibid., July 23, June 11, 1864. See
also the identical argument of a Pennsylva¬
nia black soldier in ibid, Aug. 13,1864, and
of a soldier from the 54th Mass. Rgt. in
Brown, Negro in the American Rebellion,
250-51.

44. Christian Recorder, July 11, Aug.
27, 1864.

45. Ibid, May 28, July 23,1864; Hig-
ginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 252.
For the refusal to accept pay, see also Chris¬
tian Recorder, June 11, July 23,30, Aug. 13,
27, 1864.

568

Notes to pages 83-94

46. Christian Recorder , Sept. 12,1863,
June 25, July 2, 1864; McPherson, Negro's
Civil War, 200-01; McPherson, Struggle for
Equality, 217; Emilio, History of the Fifty-
fourth Regiment, 190-91; Brown, Negro in
the American Rebellion, 251-52; Higginson,
Army Life in a Black Regiment, 280.

47. Douglass'Monthly, V (Aug. 1863),
852; Christian Recorder ; July 18,1863; John
S. Rock to the soldiers of the 5th Rgt. ofU.S.
Heavy Artillery, Natchez, Miss., May 30,

1864, Ms. address in George L. Ruffin Pa¬
pers, Howard Univ., Washington, D.C.;
McPherson, Negro's Civil War, 175-76;
Headquarters, Supervisory Committee on
Colored Enlistments, "To Men of Color,”
broadside, Historical Society of Pennsylva¬
nia. Similar sentiments may be found in
Christian Recorder, July 11, 1863.

48. Christian Recorder, Sept. 17,1864.

49. Ibid, Nov. 5, 1864.

50. McPherson, Struggle for Equality,
217-19; Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 287-89; Christian Recorder ; Nov.
5, 1864; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth
Regiment, 220-21, 227-28. On March 3,

1865, Congress enacted a law giving full re¬
troactive pay to all black regiments that had
been promised equal pay at the time of en¬
listment.

51. New York Times, June 14, 1864;
William E. Farrison, William Wells Brown
(Chicago, 1969), 382; Blassingame (ed.).
Slave Testimony, 378, 384; Herbert Ap-
theker (ed.), A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States (New
York, 1951), 486-87. For similar sentiments,
see Christian Recorder, April 23, June 11,
July 23, 1864, and New Orleans Tribune,
Aug. 25,1864. On the appointment of black
officers, see Cornish, Sable Arm, 214-17.

52. Rollin, Life and Public Services
of Martin R. Delany, 141-43; Christian
Recorder, Feb. 14, 1863.

53. Rollin, Life and Public Services of
Martin R. Delany, 166-8, 200-02, 209-26.

54. Richmond Dispatch, Aug. 5,1864,
reprinted in New York Times, Aug. 12,1864;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for July
16,1863, Univ. of South Carolina.

55. Colin Clarke to Maxwell Clarke,
Feb. 10, 1864, Williams-Chesnut-Manning
Papers, Univ. of South Carolina. For compa¬
rable sentiments, see House (ed.), "Deterio¬

ration of a Georgia Rice Plantation During
Four Years of Civil War,” 107.

56. Cornish, Sable Arm, 160, 162-63,

167.

57. Ibid,, 159-62; Wilson, Black Pha¬
lanx, 316-18.

58. Cornish, Sable Arm, 163,169,172-
73, 177-78; New York Times, Dec. 2, 1863,
Jan. 28, March 26,1864; Aptheker (ed.), Doc¬
umentary History, 487-88; Williamson, Af¬
ter Slavery, 21; Kerby, Kirby Smith's
Confederacy, 111.

59. Cornish, Sable Arm, 170-72. For
reports of prisoner exchanges, see Christian
Recorder, Feb. 25,1865, and Williamson, Af¬
ter Slavery, 21.

60. Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Johnny
Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy
(Indianapolis, 1943), 314-15; Cornish, Sable
Arm, 164, 176-77.

61. Christian Recorder, July 26,1862,
Feb. 14, June 13, 1863, April 2, 1864; New
York Times, May 20, 1863; Douglass'
Monthly, V (Aug. 1863), 849-50.

62. Basler (ed.), Collected Works of
Abraham Lincoln, VI, 357, VII, 302-03; Life
and Times of Frederick Douglass, 423-24;
Christian Recorder, April 23, 1864.

63. Christian Recorder, April 23,1864;
Cornish, Sable Arm, 173-75; Brown, Negro
in the American Rebellion, 235-47; McPher¬
son, Negro's Civil War, 217-21.

64. Christian Recorder, June 11, April
30,1864. See also "The Capture of Fort Pil¬
low,” an editorial in ibid., April 23, 1864.

65. Farrison, William Wells Brown,
391-92.

66. McPherson, Negro's Civil War,
225; Kerby, Kirby Smith's Confederacy, 312;
Cornish, Sable Arm, 176-77; Wilson, Black
Phalanx, 347-48.

67. Christian Recorder, Aug. 13,1864;
McPherson, Negro's Civil War, 222. See also
New York Times, Aug. 26, 27, Oct. 1, 1864.

68. Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 173-74; Rose, Rehearsal for Re¬
construction, 243-44; Sarah Bradford, Har¬
riet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (2nd
ed., 1886; repr. New York, 1961), 99-102.

69. Christian Recorder, April 9, June
18, 1864; March 18, April 1, 1865; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, XVII: Fla. Narr., 161.
See also "Letter from South Carolina,” in
Christian Recorder, Feb. 25, 1865.

Notes to pages 95-102

569

70. New York Times , Feb. 28, 1864;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XVII: Fla.
Narr., 82; Christian Recorder ; April 15,
1865.

71. Christian Recorder ; May 28, June
25,1864, April 15, 1865.

72. Ibid., May 28, 1864, March 25,
April 15,1865; Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary,
entry for May 3, 1865, Univ. of South
Carolina.

73. New York Tribune, March 2,1865;
Christian Recorder, April 15, 1865; Lt. Col.
John S. Bogert, 103rd U.S. Colored Troops,
to his parents, Feb. 24,1865, Univ. of South
Carolina; McPherson, Negro's Civil War,
236-37; Rollin, Life and Public Services of
Martin R. Delany, 197-98.

74. Maxwell Clarke to Mrs. John Lau¬
rence Manning, Oct. 12, 1863, Williams-
Chesnut-Manning Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries,
7; Christian Recorder, June 25, 1864; Reid,
After the War, 213; Christian Recorder, May
27, 1865.

75. New York Times, Dec. 5, 1863;
Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Jour¬
nal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1866 (New York,
1908), 261-62; Johns, Life with the Forty-
ninth Massachusetts Volunteers, 295-96;
Simkins and Patton, Women of the Confeder¬
acy, 238. For similar views of native whites,
see, e.g., Ravenel, Private Journal, 212-14;
Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 7, 8-9,
11, 18, 31-33, 34; Stone, Brokenbum, 297-
98.

76. Christian Recorder, May 6, 27,

1865.

77. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
xvm: Unwritten History, 253.

78. Cornish, Sable Arm, 287-88; Wi¬
ley, Southern Negroes, 341-44; McPherson,
Negro's Civil War, 143-47; Bryant (ed.), "A
Yankee Soldier Looks at the Negro,” 147.

79. Cornish, Sable Arm, 288; Wiley,
Life of Billy Yank, 124-25, 134-37.

80. McPherson, Negro's Civil War,
183; Johns, Life with the Forty-ninth Massa¬
chusetts Volunteers, 154; Bryant (ed.), "A
Yankee Soldier Looks at the Negro,” 141;
Wilson, Black Phalanx, 280-83; Johns, Life
with the Forty-ninth Massachusetts Volun¬
teers, 167, 168; McPherson, Negro's Civil
War, 172; New York Times, June 14, 1864,
May 17, 1863.

81. Wilson, Black Phalanx, 280, 282,
283; Gordon, War Diary of Events, 275; Hig-
ginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 29,
259.

82. Cornish, Sable Arm, 55, 261-64,
267, 288-89; Christian Recorder, Aug. 13,
1864.

83. McPherson, Negro's Civil War,
237; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XVIII:
Unwritten History, 150-51; IV: Texas Narr.
(Part 1), 232; Hepworth, Whip, Hoe, and
Sword, 187.

84. Johns, Life with the Forty-ninth
Massachusetts Volunteers, 294-95; Lt, Col.
John S. Bogert, 103rd U.S. Colored Troops,
to his parents, Feb. 1, 17, 1865, Univ. of
South Carolina.

85. New York Times, Aug. 21, 1863;
George O. Jewett to Dexter Jewett, July 18,
1863, Main File, Henry E. Huntington Li¬
brary; Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 121. See
also New York Times, April 16, 1863, Oct.
30, 1864, March 12, 1865; Joel Cook, The
Siege of Richmond (Philadelphia, 1862), 75-
76.

86. Cornish, Sable Arm, 147. See also
New York Times, April 21, 1863; Bryant
(ed.), "A Yankee Soldier Looks at the Ne¬
gro,” 146; Wilson, Black Phalange, 298, 310-
11 .

87. Towne, Letters and Diary, 94; New
York Times, Oct. 3, 1862; Johns, Life with
the Forty-ninth Massachusetts Volunteers,
169.

88. Quoted in introduction to Higgin-
son. Army Life in a Black Regiment, Collier
Books reprint edition (New York, 1962), 19-
20. On self-pride and the postwar expecta¬
tions of black soldiers, see also Christian
Recorder, Aug. 13,1864 (Sgt. John C. Brock
and Cpl. Abram C. Simms), March 18 (Sgt.
John C. Brock and Pvt. Henry C. Hoyle),
April 8 (George A. Watkins), 15 (William
Waters), May 13 (J. N. Drake), 27 (Cpl. Wil¬
liam Gibson and Pvt. W. A. Freeman); New
York Times, Feb. 20,1864, and Brown, Ne¬
gro in the American Rebellion, 280-81 (Cpl.
Spencer McDowell).

89. New York Tribune, June 8, 1863,
quoted in Guthrie, Camp-Fires of the Afro-
American, 366; Du Bois, Black Reconstruc¬
tion, 104, 110. For similar sentiments, see
New York Times, Aug. 21, 1863, and New
Era, July 28, 1870.

570

Notes to pages 103-10

90. New York Times, Aug. 17, 1865;
Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work, 314-15.
See also Ephraim McDowell Anderson,

Memoirs: Historical and Personal (St. Louis,
1868), 400-01; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in
the Wheat, 179.

Chapter Three: Kingdom Cornin'

1. Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 217-18.

2. Louis Manigault to "Mon Cher
Pere” [Charles Manigault], Nov. 24, Dec. 5,
1861, Louis Manigault Letters, South
Carolina Department of Archives and His¬
tory, Columbia; Louis Manigault to Charles
W. Henry, April 10, 1863, with enclosure
containing description and cropped photo¬
graph of a runaway slave, Manigault Family
Letters, South Caroliniana Library, Univ. of
South Carolina; Louis Manigault, Memos on
Overseers, Gowrie Plantation (Savannah
River), Feb. 1,1857, Dec. 20,1858, and "Visit
to 'Gowrie’ and 'East Hermitage’ Planta¬
tions,” March 1867, Manigault Plantation
Records, Southern Historical Collection,
Univ. of North Carolina; House (ed.), "Dete¬
rioration of a Georgia Rice Plantation Dur¬
ing Four Years of Civil War,” 98-117; Ulrich
B. Phillips (ed.), Plantation and Frontier:
1649-1863 (2 vols.; Cleveland, 1910), I, 138,
320-21, II, 32-33, in John R. Commons et al.
(eds.), A Documentary History of American
Industrial Society (10 vols.; Cleveland,
1910-11). See also James M. Clifton, "A
Half-Century of a Georgia Rice Plantation,”
North Carolina Historical Review, XLVII
(1970), 383-415.

3. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XIV:
N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 279; John Houston Bills,
Ms. Diary, entry for Jan. 10,1863, Univ. of
North Carolina; New York Times, April 12,
1862 (the incident was related by "C.H.W.,”
a Times correspondent writing from Centre-
vilie, Virginia).

4. Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 5;
Washington, Up from Slavery, 19-20.

5. Heyward, Seed from Madagascar,
135; S. H. Boineau to Charles Heyward, Jan.
6,1865, Univ. of South Carolina; Jones (ed.),
Heroines of Dixie, 196-97; Catherine Bar¬
bara Broun, Ms. Diary, entry for Jan. 1,
1864, Univ. of North Carolina. See also
Ravenel, Private Journal, 205; Susan Brad¬
ford Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years
(Macon, 1926; repr. Gainesville, 1968), 168.

6. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI:
Ala. Narr., 270. For similar recollections,
see III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 14, and XIV: N.C.
Narr. (Part 1), 128. The song "OP Gen’ral
Bragg’s A-Mowin’ Down de Yankees” also
captured much of this feeling. Newman Ivey
White (ed.), North Carolina Folklore (7 vols.;
Durham, N.C., 1952-64), II, 543-44.

7. See e.g., Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, XTV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 86.

8. Macrae, Americans at Home, 133;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI: Ala.
Narr., 270-71.

9. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 19; New
York Tribune, March 2, 1865; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 202;
V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 158; XIV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 249-50.

10. John Houston Bills, Ms. Diary, en¬
try for Jan. 14, 1863, Univ. of North
Carolina; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the
Wheat, 144. See also Stone, Brokenbum, 33,
35, and Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Miss. Narr., 63-64.

11. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XII:
Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 278; V: Texas Narr. (Part
3), 230; E: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 113-19;
Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter,
188-89. See also Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, II and IE: S. C. Narr. (Part 1), 72,248,
(Part 2), 19,54,325, (Part 3), 26, (Part 4), 225;
VI: Ala. Narr., 49-50, 89, 99, 144, 225, 331,
373, 420; VII: Okla. Narr., 106; XIV: N.C.
Narr. (Part 1), 419; Jacob Stroyer, "My Life
in the South,” in Katz (ed.), Five Slave Nar¬
ratives, 36; Washington, Up from Slavery,
19; Elizabeth W. Allston Pringle, Chronicles
of Chicora Wood (New York, 1922), 221-24,
227-28; The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge (ed.
James I. Robertson; Athens, Ga., 1962), 91-
92, 100; Matthew Page Andrews (ed.), The
Women of the South in War Times (Balti¬
more, 1920), 237-38; Chesnut, Diary from
Dixie, 475; and Katharine M. Jones (ed.),
When Sherman Came: Southern Women and
the fr Great March ” (Indianapolis, 1964), 116,
252.

Notes to pages 110-20

571

12. When the World Ended: The Diary
of Emma LeConte (ed. Earl S. Miers; New
York, 1957), 31,41; Wiley, Southern Negroes,
71; Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 10;
Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 234;
Mrs. Mary Jones to Col. Charles C. Jones,
Jr., May 19,1863, in Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1062.

13. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 306;
Jones (ed.), Heroines of Dixie, 232; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part
2), 241.

14. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 247, (Part 2), 20, 157;
Stone, Brokenbum, 198, 203; Wise, End of
an Era, 208,210. See also Myers (ed.), Chil¬
dren of Pride, 885-86.

15. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, X:
Ark. Narr. (Part 5), 136; Black Republican
(New Orleans), May 20, 1865. For different
versions and some recollections of the song,
see White (ed.), North Carolina Folklore, II,
541-43, and Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
II: S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 197; IV: Texas Narr.
(Part 2), 28-29; XVHI: Unwritten History,
232

16. Douglass*Monthly, IV (Jan. 1862),

580.

17. Stone, Brokenbum, 168-69; Ne-
vins, Warfor the Union: The Organized War,
1863-1864, 417.

18. Towne, Letters and Diary, 27-29,
94_95; Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction,
17, 104-05, 108-09; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 203. See also
Forten, Journal, 144; New York Times, Dec.
1,1861; Ruffin, Diary, H, 173; Isabella Mid¬
dleton Leland (ed.), "Middleton Correspon¬
dence, 1861-1865,” South Carolina Histor¬
ical Magazine, LXIII (1962), 38.

19. P. L. Rainwater (ed.), "Letters of
James Lusk Alcorn,” Journal of Southern
History, HI (1937), 200-01; Ravenel, Private
Journal, 210-11, 212.

20. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XV:
N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 200; VI: Ala. Narr., 420;
XVH: Fla. Narr., 45; Xffl: Ga. Narr. (Part 4),
145; New York Times, May 10,1864; Havi¬
land, A Woman’s Life-Work, 274.

21. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVTH: Unwritten History, 253; IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 1), 279-80; XTV: N.C. Narr. (Part
1), 157. For a Unionist planter who freed his
slaves and offered to pay them for their la¬

bor, as the Yankee troops approached, see
Haviland, A Wonsan’s Life-Work, 315-16.

22. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Okla. Narr., 275-77,281. For a similar story,
see HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 26-27.

23. Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work,
274; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II: S.C.
Narr. (Part 2), 329.

24. F-rnTTifl E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry
for March 31,1865, Univ. ofSouth Carolina.

25. John Houston Bills, Ms. Diary, en¬
try for July 11, 1864, Univ. of North
Carolina; Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confed¬
erate Girl’s Diary (Boston, 1913), 277—78.

26. Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 127—28, 355.

27. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVH: Fla. Narr., 161-62. The song is also
recalled in XVIII: Unwritten History, 32.

28. Ibid., XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 24-
25.

29. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 13. For comparable experi¬
ences, see Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 173-74; New York Times, April
16, June 19, 1863; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 28.

30. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II:
S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 236,335; VII: Miss. Narr.,
131; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 428; New York
Times, June 19,1863.

31. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 178; XVTH: Unwrit¬
ten History, 198; IH: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 23—
24; Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman, 84;
Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern
States, 94; Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 55; Leland (ed.), "Middleton
Correspondence, 1861-1865,” 101; Jervey
and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 17-18; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part
1), 250.

32. Nichols, The Great March, 59; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, XI: Mo. Narr.,
54; IX: Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 198.

33. Armstrong, Old Massa’s People,
301-02; New York Times, June 14, 1863.

34. Nichols, The Great March, 59;
Armstrong find Ludlow, Hampton and Its
Students, 83; Dennett, The South As It Is,
320. For images of the Yankees, as imparted
by masters and mistresses, and for the reac¬
tions of slaves, see also Towne, Letters and
Diary, 27, 29; Wiley (ed.), Letters of Warren

572

Notes to pages 121-24

Akin, 21; Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life
in Camp, 7-8; Dennett, The South As It Is,
174, 319; Haviland, A Woman's Life-Work,
264; Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 42,107,
252; Johns, Life with the Forty-ninth Massa¬
chusetts Volunteers, 179; James E. Glazier
to his parents, Feb. 28,1862, Glazier Collec¬
tion, Huntington Library; New York Times,
July 19, Aug. 8, Dec. 4,1861, Jan. 20, April
12, Nov. 9, 1862; Blassingame (ed.), Slave
Testimony, 383; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, VII: Miss. Narr., 162; XHI: Ga. Narr.
(Part 3), 162; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 136,
192,214, 277; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 12-
13; Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman, 64,
70, 84.

35. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 14; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, VIII and IX:
Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 348, (Part 3), 173; VI:
Ala. Narr., 15; Johns, Life with the Forty-
ninth Massachusetts Volunteers, 141.

36. Hepworth, Whip, Hoe, and Sword,
141; M. Waterbury, Seven Years Among the
Freedmen (3rd ed.; Chicago, 1893), 87; WPA,
Negro in Virginia, 201-02; Perdue et al.
(eds,), Weevils in the Wheat, 277. For the
reactions of slaves to the arrival of the Yan¬
kees, see also Beatty, Citizen-Soldier, 119,
124-25; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 525;
George T. Stevens, Three Years in the Sixth
Corps (Albany, N.Y., 1866), 59; New York
Times, April 14, Nov. 23,1862, May 19, June
7, 1863, Dec. 23, 1864, March 6, 1865; New
York Tribune, March 2, 4, 6, 1865; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, II and HI: S.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 142, (Part 4), 196; IX: Ark. Narr.
(Part 4), 241; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 159;
Armstrong and Ludlow, Hampton and Its
Students, 83.

37. New York Tribune, March 2,1865;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, H: S.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 151; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 15;
Nichols, The Great March, 161-62; Swint
(ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 186-87.

38. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, H:
S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 210-11; VI: Ala. Narr.,
53. For similar recollections, see H and IH:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 40, 43, 53, 105-06, 128,
235-36, 259, 264, (Part 2), 32, 290, (Part 3),
26, 91, 102, 144, 192-93, 195, (Part 4), 209,
257-58; VI: Ala. Narr., 79, 99-100, 162-63,
270, 405; XIV and XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1),
406, 425, (Part 2), 149; XVI: Va. Narr., 19;
Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 55,
108, 311.

39. Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries,
32; Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice Plan¬
tation, 208-09; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, XH: Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 248, (Part 2),
278, 282-83; VI: Ala. Narr., 190. For exam¬
ples of these diverse reactions, see also Jer¬
vey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 10-11;
Ravenel, Private Journal, 213,220; Smedes,
Memorials of a Southern Planter, 193; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, H and HI: S.C.
Narr. (Part 2), 20, (Part 3), 91; V: Texas
Narr. (Part 3), 228; VI: Ala. Narr., 190; VH:
Miss. Narr., 14; VIH: Ark. Narr. (Part 2),
181; XHI: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 256; XIV: N.C.
Narr. (Part 1), 25; XVI: Va. Narr., 52; Per¬
due et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 187.

40. Dawson, A Confederate Girl's Di¬
ary, 193; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI:
Ala. Narr., 163, 373; H: S.C. Narr. (Part 1),
31; XH: Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 248. See also VI:
Ala. Narr., 391-92, and IX: Ark. Narr. (Part
3), 198.

41. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruc¬
tion, 64; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, H:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 177; Vffl: Ark. Narr.
(Part 1), 312; VH: Miss. Narr., 39. See also
IH: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 26, 252-53; V: Texas
Narr. (Part 3), 270; VI: Ala. Narr., 50; VH:
Okla. Narr., 167; X: Ark. Narr. (Part 5), 193;
XTV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 293; Jones (ed.),
When Sherman Came, 262.

42. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry
for March 4, 1865, Univ. of South Carolina;
Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 233;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, H: S.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 77; James W. Silver (ed.), Missis¬
sippi in the Confederacy: As Seen in Retro¬
spect (Baton Rouge, 1961), 266. See also
Burge, Diary, 102; Smedes, Memorials of a
Southern Planter, 198; LeConte, When the
World Ended, 51; Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1233, 1240; Jones (ed.), When Sher¬
man Came, 7-8, 58, 232; Swint (ed.), Dear
Ones at Home, 160; Chesnut, Diary from
Dixie, 539; Macrae, Americans at Home,
259; New York Times, Dec. 27,1864; Blassin¬
game (ed.), Slave Testimony, 455; Perdue et
al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 121; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, VH: Okla. Narr., 37;
VH: Miss. Narr., 64; VHI: Ark. Narr. (Part
2), 10; XTV and XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 256,
(Part 2), 75.

43. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry
for March 4, 1863, Univ. of South Carolina;
Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1237.

Notes to pages 125-33

573

44. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IX
and XI: Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 21, (Part 7), 240.

45. Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 40-41.

46. Bryant (ed.), "'A Yankee Soldier
Looks at the Negro,” 136; Wiley, Life of Billy
Yank, 112-13.

47. New York Times, Nov. 14,1861 (re¬
printed without comment in Douglass'
Monthly, IV [Dec. 1861], 566); Rose, Re¬
hearsal for Reconstruction, 64-65.

48. Nordhoff, Freedmen of South
Carolina, 24-25; Johns, Life with the Forty-
ninth Massachusetts Volunteers, 165, 138,

49. Johns, Life with the Forty-ninth
Massachusetts Volunteers, 140,164-65. See
also Hepworth, Whip, Hoe, and Sword, 159-
60, 163-64.

50. Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 109; Fre¬
mantle, Three Months in the Southern
States, 89. See also Bryant (ed.), "A Yankee
Soldier Looks at the Negro,” 134-35; Rev.
Joel Grant to Prof. Henry Cowles, April 10,
1863, American Missionary Assn. Archives;
Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 42, 43, 112, 281.

51. Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 109,
111-12; Henry A. Anderson to Miss Salina
Saltsgiver, May 24, 1863, Henry Anderson
Papers, Louisiana State Univ.

52. Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 119; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, XTV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 96, 251; II: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 105;
Bryant (ed.), "A Yankee Soldier Looks at the
Negro,” 138-39. See also Facts Concerning
the Freedmen (Boston: The Emancipation
League, 1863), 9; John Oliver to Rev. S. S.
Jocelyn, Aug. 5, 1862; C. P. Day to W. E.
Whiting, Aug. 22, 1862; Rev. Joel Grant to
Prof. Henry Cowles, April 10,1863; Isaac S.
Hubbs to Rev. S. S. Jocelyn and George
Whipple, Jan. 8,1864; A. O. Howell, Jan. 19,
Feb. 6,1864, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; Christian Recorder, June 10, July 8,
1865; New York Times, Jan. 25, Feb. 5, July
20, 1863; Beatty, Citizen-Soldier, 132; John
Beatty, Memoirs of a Volunteer, 1861-1863
(ed. Harvey S. Ford; New York, 1946), 115;
George F. Noyes, The Bivouac and the Bat¬
tlefield (New York, 1863), 44; Winters, Civil
War in Louisiana, 175-76. For native white
views of Yankee mistreatment of slaves, see,
e.g., Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1244,
and Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 287, 331-32.

53. Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 114-15,
118; Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie after the

War (New York, 1906), 187; New York
Times, Dec. 11, 1863.

54. Johns, Life with the Forty-ninth
Massachusetts Volunteers, 139; Christian
Recorder ; Aug. 6, 1864; New York Times,
Oct. 3,1862; Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 117;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for Aug.
14, 1865, Univ. of South Carolina; South
Carolina Leader (Charleston), Nov. 25,1865.

55. Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 114;
George Whipple to Rev. S. S. Jocelyn, Aug.
1, 1862, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1230;
Nevins, War for the Union: The Organized
War, 1863-1864, 31; Perdue et al. (eds.), Wee¬
vils in the Wheat, 121; McPherson, Negro's
Civil War, 113.

56. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home,
169, 61. For similar examples of black disil¬
lusionment and protest, see New Orleans
Tribune, July 8, 16, 1865; Christian
Recorder, April 30, 1864, June 10, July 8,
1865; Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction,
240-41.

57. Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 41,115-
16; James E. Glazier to his parents, Feb. 28,
1862, Glazier Collection, Huntington Li¬
brary. See also Andrew J. Bennett, The
Story of the First Massachusetts Light Bat¬
tery (Boston, 1886), 100-01; Stevens, Three
Years in the Sixth Corps, 273-74; Nevins,
War for the Union: The Organized War,
1863-1864, 416.

58. Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 41, 43.

59. Johns, Life with the Forty-ninth
Massachusetts Volunteers, 170-71; Hen¬
rietta Stratton Jaquette (ed.), South after
Gettysburg: Letters of Cornelia Hancock,
1863-1868 (New York, 1956), 63-64. See also
Bryant (ed.), "A Yankee Soldier Looks at the
Negro,” 136.

60. Thomas J. Myers to his wife, Feb.
26,1865, Thomas J. Myers Papers, Univ. of
North Carolina; Conyngham, Sherman's
March Through the South, 275-78; Rose, Re¬
hearsal for Reconstruction, 332; Emma E.
Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for May 3, 1865,
Univ. of South Carolina; Pearson (ed.), Let¬
ters from Port Royal, 293-94; Towne, Letters
and Diary, 148; Nichols, The Great March,
71; Winther (ed.), With Sherman to the Sea,
136, 138; Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 128;
New York Tribune, Jan. 9,1865. For slaves
leaving with the Union forces, see also
Beatty, Citizen-Soldier, 141; Bennett, Story

574

Notes to pages 133-37

of the First Massachusetts Light Battery,
153-64; Rev. Horace James, Annual Report
of the Superintendent of Negro Affairs in
North Carolina, 1864 (Boston, n.d.), 36-37;
Bryant (ed.), "A Yankee Soldier Looks at the
Negro,” 145-46; New York Times, Dec. 2,

1861, Dec. 18, 1862, April 6,16, 18, May 9,
June 5, 28, Aug. 8, 1863, Jan. 9, March 7,
May 27,1864, March 21,1865; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 2),
110; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 171-72; Whar¬
ton, Negro in Mississippi, 46-47; William¬
son, After Slavery, 24-25; Bradford, Harriet
Tubman, 99-101.

61. Black Republican, May 13, 1865;
Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen, 2;
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 322,
332. See also Thompson, An Englishman in
the American Civil War, 98; Elijah P. Bur¬
ton, Diary of E. P. Burton, Surgeon, 7th Regi¬
ment, Illinois (Des Moines, 1939), 6, 8;
Horace James, Report of the Superintendent
of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864,
57-58 (Appendix).

62. William F. Messner, "Black Vio¬
lence and White Response: Louisiana,

1862, ” Journal of Southern History, XLI
(1975), 21; Francis G. Peabody, Education
for Life: The Story of Hampton Institute
(New York, 1922), 34. For conditions in the
contraband camps, see also Hannibal Ham¬
lin to the Freedman’s Relief Assn, of Phila¬
delphia, June 6,1862; Hamlin to Joseph M.
Truman, Jr., June 13 and Sept. 9, 1862;
George E. Baker to Truman, March 3,1863;
Lizzie MacLaurin to the Bethany Scholars,
April 4, 1864, Papers of the Pennsylvania
Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slav¬
ery, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Rev.
Joel Grant to Prof. Henry Cowles, April 10,
1863; A. 0. Howell (Superintendent of
Freedmen Camp, Natchez), Jan. 19 and Feb.
6,1864; L. A. Eberhart to Rev. C. H. Fowler,
Feb. 1,1864, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; Burton, Diary, 8; Jaquette (ed.),
South after Gettysburg, 33-50; New York
Times, March 20, Oct. 27, 28, Dec. 9, 1862,
Jan. 18, Aug. 9, Nov. 12,1863, Feb. 26,1865.
For Federal policy toward the contrabands,
see Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman,
and Wiley, Southern Negroes, 175-294.

63. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 986,
1197-98; New York Times, Nov. 8, 1862,
March 26,1865; Stone, Brokenbum, 128; G.

P. Whittington, (ed.), "Concerning the Loy¬
alty of Slaves in North Louisiana in 1863:
Letters from John H. Ransdell to Governor
Thomas O. Moore, dated 1863,” Louisiana
Historical Quarterly, XIV (1931), 492. "The
contrabands are curious as to what shall be
their fate. One or two told me that after
working on our entrenchments it would go
hard with them if their masters returned.
One inquired suspiciously why his master’s
name was taken down.” New York Times,
July 20,1861.

64. Nichols, The Great March, 62. See
also ibid., 83; Mary Ames, From a New Eng¬
land Woman’s Diary in Dixie in 1865
(Springfield, Mass., 1906), 64; New York
Times, Dec. 18,1861.

65. Cornelia Phillips Spencer, The
Last Ninety Days of the War in North
Carolina (New York, 1866), 186-87; New
York Times, Dec. 1, 1862.

66. Wilmer Shields to William New¬
ton Mercer, Dec. 11, 1863, Jan. 25, 1864,
June 10 (incl. enclosure: "List of Negroes
who have remained, been absent and re¬
turned, and are now on the plantations”),
Sept. 20, 1865, Dec. 4, 1866, W. N. Mercer
Papers, Louisiana State Univ.

67. Alexander F. Pugh, Ms. Plantation
Diary, entries for Oct. 27, 28, 30, 31, Nov. 1,
2,5,6,1862, Nov. 3,1863, A. F. Pugh Papers,
Louisiana State Univ.; Annette Koch to
[Christian D. Koch], June 27, 1863, Chris¬
tian D. Koch Papers, Louisiana State Univ.;
Okar to Gustave Lauve, June 26,1863, Gus¬
tave Lauve Papers, Louisiana State Univ.

68. John H. Ransdell to Gov. Thomas
O. Moore, May 24,26,31,1863, in Whitting¬
ton (ed.), "Concerning the Loyalty of Slaves
in North Louisiana,” 491-93, 495, 497. For
the rapid erosion of slavery in Louisiana and
Mississippi, see also, e.g., Samuel A. Agnew
(Miss.), Ms. Diary, entry for Oct. 29, 1862,
Univ. of North Carolina; Bayside Plantation
Record (Bayou Teche, La.), entries for April
10, May 1, 3, 4, 1863, Univ. of North
Carolina; Louisa T. Lovell (Palmyra planta¬
tion, near Natchez) to Capt. Joseph Lovell,
Feb. 7, 1864, Quitman Papers, Univ. of
North Carolina; Emily Caroline Douglas
(Adams Co., Miss.), Ms. Autobiography, 167-
68, Louisiana State Univ.; New York Times,
Dec. 1,1862, Oct. 17,1863; Sitterson, Sugar
Country, 209-11; William K. Scarborough,

Notes to pages 138-42

575

The Overseer: Plantation Management in the
Old South (Baton Rouge, 1966), 153-55; F.
W. Smith (ed.), "The Yankees in New Al¬
bany: Letters of Elizabeth Jane Beach, July
29,1864,” Journal of Mississippi History, II
(Jan. 1940), 46; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen
in Civil War Louisiana, 14r-23; James L.
Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern
Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruc¬
tion (New York, 1977), 112-17.

69. Thompson, An Englishman in the
American Civil War , 94; John Houston Bills,
Ms. Diary, entries for Jan. 10, 14, May 18,
27, June 1,3,5,8,16, Aug. 21, 29, Oct. 8,17,
1863 (incl. "Memoranda 1863: List of Ser¬
vants Carried Off by Federal Army and
Value”), Feb. 10,11, July 11,1864, Univ. of
North Carolina.

70. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
1241, 1243, 1247.

71. Okar to Gustave Lauve, June 26,
1863, Gustave Lauve Papers, Louisiana
State Univ.; Andrews, War-Time Journal of
a Georgia Girl, 183. See also Wiley, South¬
ern Negroes, 12; Bettersworth (ed.), Missis¬
sippi in the Confederacy, 240; Williamson,
After Slavery, 24. For slaves who returned
only to leave again, see, e.g., Wilmer Shields
to William N. Mercer, June 10,1865, Mercer
Papers, Louisiana State Univ.; Sydnor, A
Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, 297;
Sitterson, Sugar Country, 211.

72. Stone, Brokenbum, 185; John H.
Bills, Ms. Diary, entries for Sept. 22, 24,
1863, Univ. of North Carolina; Myers (ed.),
Children of Pride, 1263; WPA, Negro in Vir¬
ginia, 202; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II:
S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 145; Ruffin, Diary, II,
409-10; Stone, Brokenbum, 179. See also
Rainwater (ed.), "Letters of James Lusk Al¬
corn,” 201; Easterby (ed.), South Carolina
Rice Plantation, 207; Whittington (ed.),
"Concerning the Loyalty of Slaves in North
Carolina in 1863,” 501. Edmund Ruffin, Jr.,
offered amnesty "for the past insubordina¬
tion” to his returning slaves, "provided their
future conduct should be good, as it had been
generally previously.” Ruffin, Diary, II,
367-68.

73. Ravenel, Private Journal, 251;
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 16-17,
106-08; New York Times, Nov. 20, 1861;
Botume, First Days Amongst the Contra¬
bands, 11, 33-34; Christian Recorder, Nov.

30, 1861. Few towns were sacked as thor¬
oughly as Beaufort. Although an estimated
3,000 slaves helped to level Jackson, Missis¬
sippi, that was a joint operation with Union
troops; in nearby Yazoo City, however, the
blacks themselves burned down fourteen
houses and the courthouse, and the prolifer¬
ation of arson attempts elsewhere, some of
them spectacularly successful, gave rise to
new fears of a general insurrection. Silver
(ed.), Mississippi in the Confederacy, 268-69;
Harvey Wish, "Slave Disloyalty under the
Confederacy,” Journal of Negro History,
XXm (1938), 444; Williamson, AfterSlavery,
5L

74. Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries,
12; D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Family
Letters, 193, 218; Easterby (ed.), South
Carolina Rice Plantation, 208. See also
Ruffin, Diary, II, 598; Ravenel, Private Jour¬
nal, 216; Leland (ed.), "Middleton Corre¬
spondence, 1861—1865,” 106; Ada Sterling, A
Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of
Alabama (New York, 1905), 182; Stone, Bro¬
kenbum, 210; D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason
Smith Family Letters, 188,189; Elias Horry
Deas to Anne Deas, Aug. 12,1865, Deas Pa¬
pers, Univ. of South Carolina.

75. Ravenel, Private Journal, 217; Le¬
land (ed.), "Middleton Correspondence,
1861-1865,” 107; Stone, Brokenbum, 193,
203; Williamson, After Slavery, 5-6. See also
Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 11,12,33,
35, 37; Dawson, Confederate GirVs Diary,
178; D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Fam¬
ily Letters, 187; New York Times, Dec. 21,
1862; Whittington (ed.), "Concerning the
Loyalty of Slaves in North Louisiana in
1863,” 492; Jones (ed.), When Sherman
Came, 268.

76. John H. Bills, Ms. Diary, entry for
Feb. 11,1864, Univ. ofNorth Carolina; East¬
erby (ed.), South Carolina Rice Plantation,
208-10, 328; Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora
Wood, 268-69. For comparable scenes, see,
e.g., Elias Horry Deas to Anne Deas, May 5,
1865, Deas Papers, Univ. of South Carolina;
Edward Lynch to Joseph Glover [June 1865],
Glover-North Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; Avary, Dixie after the War, 341-
42.

77. Towne, Letters and Diary, 34; New
York Times, Nov. 20,1861, Nov. 16,20, Dec.
21, 1862; Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora

576

Notes to pages 143-50

Wood , 269; Sitterson, Sugar Country , 212.

78. Easterby(ed.), South Carolina Rice
Plantation, 213; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, 605; New York Times, Dec. 29, 1863;
Christian Recorder, Nov. 26,1862. See also
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 2), 163; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2),
119; XVI: Tenn. Narr., 12.

79. Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Diary, en¬
tries for Oct. 31, Nov. 1,1862, Univ. of North
Carolina; Louisa T. Lovell to Capt. Joseph
Lovell, Feb. 7,1864, Quitman Papers, Univ.
of North Carolina. See also Sitterson, Sugar
Country, 214.

80. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 212; Ne-
vins, War for the Union: The Organized War,
1863-1864, 376-77; Jones (ed.), Heroines of
Dixie, 118; Emily Caroline Douglas, Ms. Au¬
tobiography, 168, Louisiana State Univ.

81. New York Times, Dec. 1,1862, Oct.
30, 1864; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVII: Fla. Narr., 246; Sitterson, Sugar Coun¬
try, 220; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 74; Scar¬
borough, The Overseer, 153-54. See also
Clayton Jones, "Mississippi Agriculture,”
Journal of Mississippi History, XXIV (April
1962), 138; Sitterson, "The McCollams: A
Planter Family of the Old and New South,”
in Miller and Genovese (eds.), Plantation,
Town, and County, 296; Ruffin, Diary, II,
317, 320; Ravenel, Private Journal, 211-12;
Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 36; Stone,
Brokenbum, 175; Savannah Writers’
Project, Savannah River Plantations (Sa¬
vannah, 1947), 324; John H. Bills, Ms. Diary,
entries from Jan. 10,1863, to Dec. 14,1864,
Univ. of North Carolina.

82. For a discussion of the overseer un¬
der slavery, see Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, 12-21, and Scarborough, The Overseer

83. Nevins, War for the Union: The Or¬
ganized War, 1863-1864, 377; New York
Times, Oct. 26,1862 (the dispatch was writ¬
ten by the New Orleans correspondent of the
Times on Oct. 16).

84. Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora
Wood, 264-65.

85. Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice
Plantation, 213, 218,328-29. See also Scar¬
borough, The Overseer, 163-64.

86. Joseph LeConte, Ware Sherman:
A Journal of Three Months *Personal Experi¬
ence in the Last Days of the Confederacy
(Berkeley, Calif., 1938), 138-34; Emma E.

Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for June 15,1865,
Univ. of South Carolina; Leland (ed.), "Mid¬
dleton Correspondence, 1861-1865,” 100-01;
Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 53.

87. Wish, "Slave Disloyalty under the
Confederacy,” 444; Wiley, Southern Negroes,
81; Christian Recorder, May 28, 1864; Per¬
due et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 162;
Dawson, Confederate Girl's Diary, 185. For
other examples, see Stone, Brokenbum, 205;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for End
of May 1865, Univ. of South Carolina; Ger-
teis, From Contraband to Freedman, 114.

88. Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries,
36; LeGrand, Journal, 130; Scarborough,
The Overseer, 154-55; Sitterson, Sugar
Country, 209-10.

89. Ruffin, Diary, II, 318; New York
Times, Oct. 17, 1863; Myers (ed.), Children
of Pride, 1248; Gerteis, From Contraband to
Freedman, 114; Rogers, History of George¬
town County, 422; Bragg, Louisiana in the
Confederacy, 216; Williamson, After Slav¬
ery, 46, 51-52.

90. Alexander F. Pugh, Ms. Plantation
Diary, entry for Nov. 5, 1862, A. F. Pugh
Papers, Louisiana State Univ.; Scarborough,
The Overseer, 153; Williamson, After Slav¬
ery, 52; Messner, "Black Violence and White
Response: Louisiana, 1862,” 22.

91. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 532;
Ravenel, Private Journal, 218, 223.

92. W. McKee Evans, Ballots and
Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower
Cape Fear (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), 76;
Stone, Brokenbum, 197.

93. Typical examples may be found in
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entries for
March 4,11,1865, Univ. of South Carolina;
Everard Green Baker, Ms. Diary, entry for
Dec. 26,1862, Univ. of North Carolina; Jer¬
vey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 22; Stone,
Brokenbum, 298; LeConte, Ware Sherman,
32; Avary, Dixie after the War, 196; Myers
(ed.), Children of Pride, 1218-19; Easterby
(ed.), South Carolina Rice Plantation, 207-
08; New York Tribune, March 23,1865; Sim-
kins and Patton, Women of the Confederacy,
164-65; Jones (ed.), When Sherman Came,
68, 134.

94. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 528.

95. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 70; Ne¬
vins, War for the Union: The Organized War
to Victory, 1864-1865, 296-97; Smedes, Me-

Notes to pages 151-57

577

mortals of a Southern Planter ; 194r-95; Ha¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, XIV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 11-12. For other examples, see
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for
March 4, 1865, Univ. of South Carolina;
Jones (ed.), When Sherman Came, 21; Ha¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, XTV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 250.

96. Washington, Up from Slavery, 19;
Hawick (ed.), American Slave, HI: S.C. Narr.
(Part 3), 170; VII: Okla. Narr., 337-38; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 391; Emma E. Holmes,
Ms. Diary, entry for March 31, 1865, Univ.
of South Carolina.

97. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry
for End of May, 1865, Univ. of South
Carolina; Dawson, Confederate GirTs Diary,
212; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 544. Two
months earlier, on May 2,1865, Mary Ches¬
nut had noted in her diary: "The fidelity of
the Negroes is the principal topic every¬
where. There seems not a single case of a
Negro who betrayed his master ...” Ibid.,
527-28.

98. Ravenel, Private Journal, 221. See
also LeConte, 'Ware Sherman, 105-06, 125.

99. Andrews (ed.), Women of the South
in War Times, 239; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 26. For similar
examples of slave "betrayal,” see Ella Ger¬
trude (Clanton) Thomas, Ms. Journal, entry
for Dec. 12,1864, Duke Univ.; Robert Philip
Howell, Ms. Memoirs [17], Univ. of North
Carolina; Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries,
35; Smedes, Memorials of a Southern
Planter, 194; Andrews (ed.), Women of the
South in War Times, 263-64; Jones (ed.),
When Sherman Came, 21-22, 235, 243; Bet-
tersworth (ed.), Mississippi in the Confeder¬
acy, 210; Johns, Life with the Forty-ninth
Massachusetts Volunteers, 191; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, II: S. C. Narr. (Part 1),
69, (Part 2), 329-30; V: Texas Narr. (Part 3),
245; VI: Ala. Narr., 78-79; VH: Okla. Narr.,
211; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 76; Hepworth,
Whip, Hoe, and Sword, 142-44.

100. New York Times, July 29, 1863,
Dec. 12,1861; Catherine Barbara Broun, Ms.
Diary, entry for May 1,1864, Univ. of North
Carolina.

101. Hepworth, Whip, Hoe, and
Sword, 144-45; Stone, Brokenburn, 209.

102. Smedes, Memorials of a Southern
Planter, 197; House (ed.), "Deterioration of a

Georgia Rice Plantation During Four Years
of Civil War,” 107; Ella Gertrude (Clanton)
Thomas, Ms. Journal, entry for Dec. 12,
1864, Duke Univ.

103. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 503;
Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 236;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for
End of May 1865, Univ. of South Carolina.
See also Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries,
35.

104. Bell I. Wiley, The Plain People of
the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1944), 83;
Robert Philip Howell, Ms. Memoirs [17-18],
Univ. of North Carolina; Bryant (ed.), "A
Yankee Soldier Looks at the Negro,” 145;
John H. Bills, Ms. Diary, entry for May 18,
1865; House (ed.), "Deterioration of a
Georgia Rice Plantation During Four Years
of Civil War,” 102; "Visit to 'Gowrie’ and
'East Hermitage’ Plantations,” March 1867,
Manigault Plantation Records, Univ. of
North Carolina. See also Easterby (ed.),
South Carolina Rice Plantation, 190, and
Stone, Brokenburn, 193, 195,198,199, 203,
208-09, 363.

105. Mrs. Elizabeth Jane Beach to her
parents, July 29,1864, in Smith (ed.), "The
Yankees in New Albany,” 46; Andrews,
War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 321-22.

106. Avary, Dixie after the War, 190;
Lillian A. Pereyra, James Lusk Alcorn: Per¬
sistent Whig (Baton Rouge, 1966), 79.

107. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVIH: Unwritten History, 221; H: S.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 225. For a discussion of the house
servant in slavery, see Genovese, Roll, Jor¬
dan, Roll, 328-65.

108. Smedes, Memorials of a Southern
Planter, 198; Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora
Wood, 253; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 73. For
house servants who "behaved outra¬
geously,” see also Okar to Gustave Lauve,
June 26,1863, Gustave Lauve Papers, Loui¬
siana State Univ.; John H. Bills, Ms. Diary,
entry for Aug. 21, 29,1865, Univ. of North
Carolina; Louisa T. Lovell to Capt. Joseph
Lovell, Feb. 7,1864, Quitman Papers, Univ.
of North Carolina; Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1248; D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason
Smith Family Letters, 192; Stone, Broken-
bum, 173, 176; Easterby (ed.), South
Carolina Rice Plantation, 207; Chesnut, Di¬
ary from Dixie, 354; Jones (ed.), When Sher¬
man Came, 130.

578

Notes to pages 157-69

109. Richmond Examiner, quoted in
Frank Moore (ed.), The Rebellion Record (11
vols.; New York, 1861-68), IV, Part IV, 101-
02; Andrews, War-Time Journal of a Georgia
Girl, 344. See also Ravenel, Private Journal,
218,221,251,269-70, and Leland (ed.), "Mid¬
dleton Correspondence,” 100.

110. House (ed.), "Deterioration of a
Georgia Rice Plantation During Four Years
of Civil War,” 102; LeGrand, Journal, 263;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 261-63. On
June 19,1862, Edmund Ruffin made this en¬
try in his diary: "Why this property & Marl-
bourne should be especially losers of slaves,
cannot be understood, for nowhere were
they better cared for, or better managed &
treated, according to their condition of slav¬
ery.” Diary, II, 346.

111. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
427; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 9.

112. Murray, Proud Shoes, 159-60.

113. "Narrative of William Wells
Brown,” in Osofsky (ed.), Puttin’ On Ole
Massa, 212; Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Life
and Writings of Frederick Douglass (4 vols.;
New York, 1950-55), 1,157; Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave (3rd English ed.; Wortley, 1846), 40,
99.

114. Scarborough, The Overseer, 16-
19, 82-84, 93-94; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, 365-88; E. L. Pierce, The Negroes at
Port Royal (Boston, 1862), 8-10; Rose, Re¬
hearsal for Reconstruction, 132-33; S. H.
Boineau to Charles Heyward, Nov. 24,1864,
Univ. of South Carolina.

115. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI:
Ala. Narr., 66; Higginson, Army Life in a

Black Regiment, 219. For the fate of the
driver in the postwar period, see below,
Chapter 8.

116. Jesse Belflowers to Adele Petigru
Allston, Oct. 19, 1864, in Easterby (ed.),
South Carolina Rice Plantation, 310; Jervey
and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 17-18; Hitch¬
cock, Marching with Sherman, 69-70; D. E.
H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters,
237; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 387;
Ruffin, Diary, H, 317.

117. John H. Ransdell to Gov. Thomas
O. Moore, May 24, 1863, in Whittington
(ed.), "Concerning the Loyalty of Slaves in
North Louisiana in 1863,” 493; Louis Mani-
gault to Charles Manigault, Nov. 24, 1861,
South Carolina Dept, of Archives and His¬
tory, Columbia; Pierce, Negroes at Port
Royal, 8-10; Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruc¬
tion, 20, 80-81.

118. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VH: Okla. Narr, 251, 253-55.

119. Stone, Brokenbum, 171; Grace B.
Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry for March 4,1865,
Univ. of North Carolina.

120. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 143n.;
New York Times, April 2, 1865; Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll, 99; Hitchcock, Marching
with Sherman, 121-23.

121. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll,

112 .

122. "Visit to 'Cowrie’ and 'East Her¬
mitage’ Plantations,” March 23,1867, Mani¬
gault Plantation Records, Univ. of North
Carolina.

123. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI:
Ala. Narr, 81-82.

124. Ibid., II: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 151.

Chapter Four: Slaves No More

1. Irwin Silber (ed.), Soldier Songs and
Home-Front Ballads of the Civil War (New
York, 1964), 41; WPA, Negro in Virginia,
212; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the
Wheat, 117.

2. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 164-65,

201 .

3. John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s
Diary at the Confederate States Capital (2
vols.; Philadelphia, 1866; repr. in one vol¬
ume, ed. Earl Schenck Miers, 1958), 528-30;
Nevins, War for the Union: The Organized

War to Victory, 1864-1865, 294; Swint (ed.),
Dear Ones at Home, 90; Rembert W. Patrick,
The Fall of Richmond (Baton Rouge, 1960),
41-58; Jones (ed.), Heroines of Dixie, 398;
Putnam, Richmond During the Confederacy,
368-64.

4. Christian Recorder, April 8, 15, 22,
1865; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XVI:
Va. Narr, 35-37; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils
in the Wheat, 103, 145-46. See also New
York Tribune, April 6, 1865.

5. Christian Recorder, April 22, 1865.

Notes to pages 170-79

579

See also Black Republican, May 20, 1865;
WPA, Negro in Virginia, 212; Jones, Rebel
War Clerk’s Diary, 530.

6. Putnam, Richmond During the
Confederacy, 367; Patrick, Fall of Rich¬
mond, 68-69; Phoebe Yates Pember, A
Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confeder¬
ate Richmond (Jackson, Tenn., 1959), 135.

7. New York Times, April 11, 1865;
McPherson, Negro’s Civil War, 67-68; Pat¬
rick, Fall of Richmond, 115. See also Chris¬
tian Recorder, April 22, 1865.

8. Hope R. Daggett to Rev. George
Whipple, April 1865; Mary E. Watson to
Rev. George Whipple, May 1, 1865; Miss
Frances Littlefield to Rev. George Whipple,
May 1, 1865, American Missionary Assn.
Archives.

9. Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work,
414-15.

10. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 205, 210;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XVI: Va.
Narr., 3, 5-6; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in
the Wheat, 36-39.

11. Patrick, Fall of Richmond, 117-
18; New York Times, April 30, 1865.

12. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 266.

13. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVII: Fla. Narr., 103. See also XIV: N.C.
Narr. (Part 1), 97-98. For a description of a
plantation near Huntsville, Alabama,
where both slaves and the master dis¬
claimed any knowledge of emancipation, see
Franklin (ed.), Diary of James T. Ayers, 26-
29. The Emancipation Proclamation, for¬
mally declared on January 1,1863, applied
only to those states (or portions thereof)
“this day in rebellion against the United
States.” The loyal border slave states (Ken¬
tucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware)
and Tennessee were thereby excluded from
its provisions, along with thirteen Federal-
occupied parishes in Louisiana (including
New Orleans), forty-eight counties in West
Virginia, and seven counties in Virginia
which were "for the present, left precisely as
if this proclamation were not issued.” Wher¬
ever Union troops were in command, how¬
ever, slaves generally assumed they were
free.

14. Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry
for March 4,1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
New York Times, Dec. 30, 1861; Christian
Recorder, May 6, 1865.

15. New York Times, June 2,1863; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, H: S. C. Narr.
(Part 2), 329-30; Jones (ed.), When Sherman
Came, 235-36.

16. "Look to the Future,” Louisiana
Democrat (Alexandria), June 3,1863, quoted
in Whittington (ed.), "Concerning the Loy¬
alty of Slaves in North Louisiana in 1863,”
489-90.

17. Whittington (ed.), "Concerning the
Loyalty of Slaves in North Louisiana in
1863,” 494, 500, 501; Rainwater (ed.), "Let¬
ters of James Lusk Alcom,” 201, 202.

18. New York Times, April 14,1864.

19. Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries,
41; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XTV: N.C.
Narr. (Part 1), 97; Blassingame (ed.), Slave
Testimony, 541; Scarborough, The Overseer,
149. See also Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 310-11.

20. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Okla. Narr., 95-96.

21. Ibid., XU: Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 248.
See also VI: Ala. Narr., 225.

22. Ibid., XVII: Fla. Narr., 103; VH:
Miss. Narr., 81; XIE: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 64.
See also III: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 136; V: Texas
Narr. (Part 3), 204; WPA, Negro in Virginia,
208.

23. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XH:
Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 262. See also VI: Ala.
Narr., 239-40.

24. New York Times, March 30, April
4, 1865; New York Tribune, April 4, 1865;
Williamson, After Slavery, 47-48. For other
post-emancipation celebrations, see New
York Times, Jan. 3,1864 (Norfolk), Jan. 23
and Aug. 1 (Savannah), July 12 (Louisville),
14 (Raleigh), 1865; New York Tribune, Jan.
13 (Key West), July 8 (Mobile), 12 (Raleigh
and Columbia), 1865.

25. Rollin, Life and Public Services of
Martin R. Delany, 193-95; Williamson, Af¬
ter Slavery, 48-49.

26. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 520-
21; Trowbridge, The South, 291; Andrews,
War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 308.
For similar reactions, see D. E. H. Smith
(ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters, 232; Le-
Conte, When the World Ended, 85-86.

27. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
1273-74.

28. Smedes, Memorials of a Southern

Planter, 216-17; Ella Gertrude (Clanton)

580

Notes to pages 180-89

Thomas, Ms. Journal, entry for May 8,
1865, Duke Univ.; Williamson, After Slavery,

34.

29. Avary, Dixie after the War, 152;
Haviland, A Woman's Life-Work, 256;
Burge, Diary, 112-113.

30. Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry
for May 24, 30, 1865, Univ. of North
Carolina; Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, en¬
try for End of May, June 15, Aug. 25,1865,
Univ. of South Carolina.

31. Kavenel, Private Journal, 231,
232, 238, 239-40.

32. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 4), 133; Williamson, After
Slavery, 33.

33. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XII:
Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 326; IV: Texas Narr. (Part
1), 264, (Part 2), 168.

34. Ibid., IX: Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 115,
29; VII: Okla. Narr., 114; V: Texas Narr.
(Part 4), 22; Macrae, Americans at Home,
211 .

35. Mrs. Laura E. Buttolph to Mrs.
Mary Jones, June 30, 1865, in Myers (ed.)
Children of Pride, 1279. See also Burge, Di¬
ary, 113.

36. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VIE: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 128; XIII: Ga. Narr.
(Part 4), 348-49. See also XH: Ga. Narr.
(Part 2), 133; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 60.

37. Col. J. L. Haynes to Capt. B. F.
Henry, July 8, 1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands (hereafter cited as Freed-
men’s Bureau), National Archives, Wash¬
ington, D.C. See also Wharton, Negro in
Mississippi, 48, and Joe M. Richardson, The
Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida,
1865-1877 (Tallahassee, 1965), 13-14.

38. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc.
70, Freedmen’s Bureau (Washington, D.C.,
1866), 9-10,99,154. For recollections of such
meetings by ex-slaves, see Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 178;
VXH: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 37-38; XIII: Ga.
Narr. (Part 4), 34.

39. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV
and V: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 45-46, (Part 3),
70; Ravenel, Private Journal, 213-14.

40. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 225; Macrae, Americans
at Home, 209; Black Republican, April 29,

1865; Christian Recorder, Aug. 19,1865. See
also Christian Recorder, July 1, 1865; Den¬
nett, The South As It Is, 26; Perdue et al.
(eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 94; Wharton,
Negro in Mississippi, 47; Williamson, After
Slavery, 33.

41. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV
and V: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 179, (Part 3), 12,
78. For similar recollections, see IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 1), 115,164, (Part 2), 8, 248; VIE
and IX: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 334, (Part 3),
156. For the concern of Federal officials, see
39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Com¬
mittee on Reconstruction, Part IV, 37; House
Exec. Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bureau, 146; Sen¬
ate Exec. Doc. 27, Reports of the Assistant
Commissioners of the Freedmen’s Bureau
made since December 1, 1865 (Washington,
D.C., 1866), 83.

42. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Okla. Narr., 293-94; E. Merton Coulter,
"Slavery and Freedom in Athens, Georgia,
1860-66,” in Miller and Genovese (eds.),
Plantation, Town, and County, 361; Chris¬
tian Recorder, Aug. 19,1865, Jan. 20,1866;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 121-22.

43. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XTV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 60.

44. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 209.

45. Kathryn L. Morgan, "Caddy Buf¬
fers: Legends of a Middle Class Negro Fam¬
ily in Philadelphia,” Keystone Folklore
Quarterly, XI (Summer 1966), 75.

46. Washington, Up from Slavery, 20;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV and V:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 78, (Part 4), 82; XIII:
Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 256, 85.

47. Ibid., VH: Okla. Narr., 282; XVI:
Tenn. Narr., 15.

48. Ibid., HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 119;
V: Texas Narr. (Part 4), 138; Blassingame
(ed.), Slave Testimony, 586. Nearly all of the
ex-slaves interviewed by the WPA had a
vivid and often detailed recollection of the
master’s announcement of freedom. See,
e.g., Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV and V:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 82, 161-62, 208, (Part
2), 78,199, (Part 3), 33,36,216,234, (Part 4),
60, 124; Vn: Okla. Narr., 150-51, 169; X:
Ark. Narr. (Part 5), 18, (Part 6), 27; XH: Ga.
Narr. (Part 1), 111; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2),
85-86; XVI: Tenn. Narr., 15.

49. Ibid., IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part
1), 208, (Part 2), 78, (Part 3), 33; Francis W.

Notes to pages 189-201

581

Dawson to [Joseph A. Reeks], June 13,1865,
F. W. Dawson Papers, Duke Univ.

50. Ravenel, Private Journal, 210;
New Orleans Picayune, as reprinted in Semi-
Weekly Louisianian (New Orleans), June
18,1871; Loyal Georgian (Augusta), March
17,1866. See also Burge, Diary, 98.

51. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Okla. Narr., 299; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1),
255; XIH: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 256; VI: Ala.
Narr., 41. See also XTV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1),
280-81.

52. Ibid, IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part
1), 122, (Part 3), 66; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2),
85-86.

53. Ibid., VI33: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 14;
IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 139, (Part 3),
192. See also H: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 314; IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 110,167; XII: Ga. Narr.
(Part 1), 102; XVI: Ky. Narr., 108.

54. Ravenel, Private Journal, 240; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, NHL Ark. Narr.
(Part 2), 186; V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 228.
See also IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 71, 162;
Vffl: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 349; XII: Ga. Narr.
(Part 2), 236; Evans, Ballots and Fence
Rails, 74-75; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
226; John William De Forest, A Union Offi¬
cer in the Reconstruction (eds. James H.
Croushore and David M. Potter; New Ha¬
ven, 1948), 112-13; Perdue et al (eds.), Wee¬
vils in the Wheat, 3-4.

55. Avary, Dixie after the War, 183-
85.

56. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVG: Fla. Narr., 130.

57. Ibid, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 6-8;
XI: Mo. Narr., 313-16; HI: S. C. Narr. (Part
3), 278; XH: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 278. See also
XVTH: Unwritten History, 62, and IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 1), 142.

58. Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the
Wheat, 294; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 52, (Part 3),
53,261; X: Ark. Narr. (Part 6), 27A. See also
XVI: Tenn. Narr., 15, and Botume, First
Days Amongst the Contrabands, 59.

59. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VH:
Okla. Narr., 283; Heyward, Seed from
Madagascar, 141.

60. Josiah Gorgas, Ms. Journal, entry
for June 15,1865, Univ. of North Carolina.

61. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 79,

103; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Doug¬
lass, 48; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 296.

62. Avary, Dixie after the War, 181;
Chamberlain, Old Days in Chapel Hill, 130;
A. A. Taylor, The Negro in the Reconstruc¬
tion of Virginia (Washington, D.C., 1926),
73; Sidney Andrews, The South since the
War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel
and Observation in Georgia and the Caroli¬
nes (Boston, 1866), 25; Emma E. Holmes,
Ms. Diary, entry for June 15,1865, Univ. of
South Carolina; Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1278.

63. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 532,
529. For the attempts of former slaveholding
families to perform the house labor them¬
selves, see below, Chapter 7.

64. Trowbridge, The South, 187; Elias
Horry Deas to Anne Deas, July 15, 1865,
Deas Papers, Univ. of South Carolina.

65. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
1294, 1296; Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of
the Plantation (Chicago, 1934), 131; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 155-56.

66. Elias Horry Deas to Anne Deas,
Aug. 12,1865, Deas Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; Edward Lynch to Joseph Glover [c.
June 1865], Glover-North Papers, Univ. of
South Carolina.

67. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 233. For white families who
preferred to retain their former slaves, see,
e.g., Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1323;
Colored Tennessean (Nashville), Oct. 14,
1865; WPA, Negro in Virginia, 221.

68. New York Tribune, Dec. 8, 1865;
Edward Lynch to Joseph Glover [c. June
1865], Univ. of South Carolina. For a discus¬
sion of the insurrection panic of 1865, see
below, Chapter 8.

69. Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 249-50.

70. Towne, Letters and Diary, 34-35;
NordhofF, Freedmen of South Carolina, 7.

71. Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the
Freedmen, 35; Ella Gertrude (Clanton)
Thomas, Ms. Journal, entry for May 17,
1865, Duke Univ.; Colored People to the
Governor of Mississippi, Dec. 3, 1865, Pe¬
tition of the Freedmen of Claiborne County,
Miss., filed in the Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Elizabeth

582

Notes to pages 201-17

Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty
Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White
House (New York, 1868), 73-74.

72. Rawick (ed.), American Slave , II:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 69; Edward Lynch to Jo¬
seph Glover [c. June 1865], Univ. of South
Carolina; Spencer, Last Ninety Days of the
War in North Carolina, 187; Chamberlain,
Old Days in Chapel Hill, 123.

73. Macrae, Americans at Home, 348.
See also Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 142.

74. W. E. Towne to Bvt. Maj. Gen.
Rufus Saxton, Aug. 17,1865, Records of the
Assistant Commissioners, South Carolina
(Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, VI: Ala. Narr.,
80.

75. De Forest, Union Officer in the Re¬
construction, 65.

76. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII:
Okla. Narr., 131, 133; W. E. Towne to Bvt.
Maj. Gen. Rufus Saxton, Aug. 17, 1865,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau; Bennett, The South As It Is,
199-200.

77. Armstrong and Ludlow, Hampton
and Its Students, 105; Rawick (ed.), Ameri¬
can Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 189;
Macrae, Americans at Home, 317. See also
Forten, Journal, 134.

78. Armstrong and Ludlow, Hampton
and Its Students, 109-14.

79. Reid, After the War, 478; Emma E.
Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for June 15,1865,
Univ. of South Carolina. For the similar ex¬
perience of Pierce Butler and his daughter,
Frances Leigh, as they returned to their ex¬
tensive rice plantations in Georgia, see
Frances B. Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia
Plantation since the War (London, 1883),
14-15, 21-22.

80. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 540. A
similar experience may be found in Edward
Lynch to Joseph Glover [c. June 1865], Univ.
of South Carolina.

81. Edward Barnwell Heyward to
"Tat” [Catherine Maria Clinch Heyward] [c.
1867], Heyward Family Papers, Univ. of
South Carolina; Heyward, Seed from
Madagascar, 154-55.

82. Avary, Dixie after the War, 341-
45.

83. Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice

Plantation, 209-11, 328-29; Pringle, Chron¬
icles of Chicora Wood, 260-75.

84. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, HI:
S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 54; Eppes, Through Some
Eventful Years, 272; Heyward, Seed from
Madagascar, 138,147; Jervey and Ravenel,
Two Diaries (entry for Feb. 27,1865), 6; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, VH: Okla. Narr.,
273; V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 216; VH: Miss
Narr., 94; Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and
Robert Tallant (eds.), Gumbo Ya- Ya: A Col¬
lection of Louisiana Folk Tales (Cambridge,
1945), 256.

85. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, X:
Ark. Narr. (Part 6), 65-66. See also XHI: Ga.
Narr. (Part 4), 170; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1),
335; WPA, Negro in Virginia, 209.

86. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VIH: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 50; XTV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 145.

87. Ibid,, V: Texas Narr. (Part 4), 109;
VI: Ala. Narr., 381; III: S.C. Narr. (Part 3),
141. See also H: S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 340, and
V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 16.

88. Ibid., H: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 142;
Andrews (ed.), Women of the South in War
Times, 192-93; Eppes, Negro of the Old
South, 119. For other examples, see Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part
4), 144-46: VI: Ala. Narr., 219; VIH: Ark.
Narr. (Part 1), 65,147, (Part 2), 75-76; XHI:
Ga. Narr. (Part 4), 347.

89. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 78; HI: S.C. Narr.
(Part 4), 119; Armstrong, Old Massa’s People,
315; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony,
492.

90. Avary, Dixie after the War, 183;
Caroline R. Ravenel to D. E. Huger Smith,
July 26 [1865], in D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason
Smith Family Letters, 225. For similar sen¬
timents, see Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VIH: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 76, and Pringle,
Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 283-84.

91. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVTH: Unwritten History, 202; IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 1), 234; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, 29-30. For a classic example of such
testimony, see Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VH: Okla. Narr., 71-72.

92. W. L. DeRosset to Louis Henry
DeRosset, June 20, 1866, DeRosset Family
Papers, Univ. of North Carolina.

93. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Twras Narr. (Part 1), 200, (Part 2), 133;

Notes to pages 217-27

583

Washington, Up from Slavery , 21. For other
examples, see Heyward, Seed from
Madagascar, 129; WPA, Negro in Virginia,
211; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, HI: S.C.
Narr. (Part 3), 178; IV and V: Texas Narr.
(Part 1), 241, (Part 2), 211, (Part 3), 257, (Part
4), 82, 172-73; VH: Okla. Narr., 133; VIII:
Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 9, 38, (Part 2), 153; XII
and XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 50,181-82,271,
(Part 4), 112; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 661.

94. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 133; XVH: Fla. Narr.,
160-61; WPA, Negro in Virginia, 211.

95. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VH:
Okla. Narr., 301; Wiley, Southern Negroes,
22; WPA, Negro in Virginia, 209-10.

96. New York Tribune, April 6, 1865;
New York Times, Jan. 17, 1864.

97. Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry

for May 30, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
Josiah Gorgas, Ms. Journal, entry for June
15, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, VH: Okla. Narr.,
133.

98. Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry
for May 30, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Fam¬
ily Letters, 192; Williamson, After Slavery,
37.

99. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VH:
Okla. Narr., 151. See also IV: Texas Narr.
(Part 1), 277.

100. "Narrative of William Wells
Brown,” in Osofsky (ed.), Puttin' On Ole
Massa, 220; "Extracts from Letters from
Mississippi,” in American Freedman, HI
(July 1869), 20.

101. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VH: Okla. Narr., 29.

Chapter Five: How Free Is Free?

1. William Francis Allen, Charles Pic¬
kard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison
(eds.), Slave Songs of the United States (New
York, 1867; repr. 1965), 94; Higginson, Army
Life in a Black Regiment, 218.

2. Andrews, The South since the War,

188.

3. Eppes, Negro of the Old South, 121-
22, 130, 138-39.

4. Trowbridge, The South, 68; Avary,
Dixie after the War, 190. For the same im¬
agery, see also Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VHI: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 227.

5. Coulter, "Slavery and Freedom in
Athens, Georgia, 1860-66,” in Miller and
Genovese (eds.), Plantation, Town, and
County, 360; Cincinnati Enquirer, as quoted
in Cleveland Leader, May 22, 1865.

6. Avary, Dixie after the War, 193. For
an ex-slave who thought staying with her
"white folks” after emancipation would help
to turn her white, see Rawick (ed.), Ameri¬
can Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 6.

7. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VH:
Okla. Narr., 165-67.

8. Eppes, Negro of the Old South, 143,
133; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II: S.C.
Narr. (Part 2), 329; William W. Ball, The
State That Forgot: South Carolina's Surren¬
der to Democracy (Indianapolis, 1932), 129.

9. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 212; Pear¬
son (ed.), Letters from Port Royal, 181; H. G.
Spaulding, "Under the Palmetto,” as re¬
printed in Bruce Jackson (ed.), The Negro
and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Pe¬
riodicals (Austin, 1967), 71; Higginson,
Army Life in a Black Regiment, 218; Water-
bury, Seven Years Among the Freedmen, 76.

10. Nevins, War for the Union: The Or¬
ganized War, 1863-1864, 414; New York
Times, Nov. 12,1865; Richardson, Negro in
the Reconstruction of Florida, 10-11; Grace
B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry for May 24,
1865, Univ. of North Carolina.

11. Reid, After the War, 370; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, VIH: Ark. Narr. (Part
1), 170; Williamson, After Slavery, 8; New
York Times, Oct. 13, 1862. For similar ex¬
pressions, see National Freedman, H (Jan.
15,1866), 22; Miss Emma B. Eveleth to Rev.
Samuel Hunt, May 2,1866, American Mis¬
sionary Assn. Archives; Perdue et al. (eds.).
Weevils in the Wheat, 44.

12. H. R. Brinkerhoff to Maj. Gen. O.
O. Howard, July 8,1865, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters
Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1),
286-89.

13. Reid, After the War, 419-20; Tay-

584

Notes to pages 228-38

lor, Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia ,
82. See also Rawick (e<L), American Slave,
XVIII: Unwritten History. 267.

14. Forten, Journal, 139; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, VU: Okla. Narr., 209.

15. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, EX:
Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 78; Chesnut, Diary from
Dixie, 532.

16. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 3), 153.

17. Ibid., XIV and XV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 76, (Part 2), 351; VU: Okla. Narr.,
51. See also National Freedman, II (Jan. 15,
1866), 23.

18. Haviland, A Woman's Life-Work,
468; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XVIII:
Unwritten History, 274; Swint (ed.), Dear
Ones at Home, 99. See also Haviland, A
Woman's Life-Work, 266-67.

19. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc.
27, Reports of the Assistant Commissioners
of the Freedmen's Bureau made since Decem¬
ber 1, 1865, 151; 38 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate
Exec. Doc. 53, Preliminary Report Touching
the Condition and Management of Emanci¬
pated Refugees, Made to the Secretary of War
by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Com¬
mission, June SO, 1863 (Washington, D.C.,
1864), 3-4; De Forest, Union Officer in the
Reconstruction, 36; Dennett, The South As
It Is, 130. See also National Freedman, I
(Sept. 15, 1865), 255-56, HI (July 1869), 20;
New York Tribune, Dec. 2, 1865.

20. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 451;
Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in
Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New
York, 1976), 264-65.

21. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, EX:
Ark. Narr. (Part 4), 183; Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony, 593; Perdue et al. (eds.),
Weevils in the Wheat, 264-65; National An¬
ti-Slavery Standard, Aug. 19, 1865, as
quoted in Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 144n.

22. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 163-64. See also Reid, After
the War, 220-21.

23. Waterbury, Seven Years Among
the Freedmen, 74-75, 76.

24. Colored Tennessean, Aug. 12, Oct.
14,1865. For other examples, see Christian
Recorder, April 13,1863; Black Republican,
April 15, 22, 29, May 13, 20, 1865; Colored
American (Augusta, Ga.), Dec. 30,1865, Jan.

13,1866; Colored Tennessean, March 24,31,
1866; Tennessean, July 18, 1866; New Era
(Washington, D.C.), July 28, 1870.

25. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home,
242-43. See also ibid, 56-57, and Botume,
First Days Amongst the Contrabands, 154-
56.

26. New York Times, Sept. 8, 1865;
Fanny Smart to Adam Smart, Feb. 13,1866,
filed with the Records of the Assistant Com¬
missioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

27. Albert, House of Bondage, 102-17.

28. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 231,39. For post-emanci¬
pation "reunions” of married partners liv¬
ing on separate places, see, e.g., II and HI:
S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 82, (Part 4), 111; IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 158; XIII: Ga. Narr.
(Part 3), 117, 212; XIV and XV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 286-89, (Part 2), 369; Blassingame
(ed.), Slave Testimony, 661. The question of
where a couple would settle sometimes
proved difficult to resolve, with the husband
or wife not always willing to leave a "se¬
cure” plantation for the uncertainty of the
road or the place where the other spouse
worked. See, e.g., Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 131, and XIII:
Ga, Narr. (Part 4), 165, 166.

29. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 213; VII: Miss. Narr.,
53-54; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc.
27, Reports of the Assistant Commissioners
of the Freedmen's Bureau [1865-66], 151-52.

30. Rawick, (ed.), American Slave,
XVI: Tenn. Narr., 19-21; VH: Miss. Narr.,
13-15.

31. Ibid., XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1),
248-52. See also XHI: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 117,
and Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 533.

32. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VH:
Miss. Narr., 151-55; VI: Ala. Narr., 176-77;
V: Texas Narr. (Part 4), 118-20. See also VI:
Ala. Narr., 102.

33. For a discussion of the critical role
of kinship and familial patterns in the cul¬
ture of the slaves, see Gutman, Black Fam¬
ily in Slavery and Freedom.

34. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 28-29. On the impact
of the various apprenticeship or "binding
out” arrangements, see, e.g., Affidavit of
Caroline Johnson, April 10, 1866, Freed-

Notes to pages 238-44

585

men’s Bureau, Georgia, Registers of Letters
Received; Wm. H. Beadle to Col. E. Whit¬
tlesey, March 10,1866, and George S. Haw¬
ley to Lt. Fred H. Beecher, May 18,1866, in
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
North Carolina (Letters Received), Freed-
men’s Bureau; William Daniel to John A.
Needles, May 6,1865, Papers of the Pennsyl¬
vania Society for Promoting the Abolition of
Slavery, XI: 1839-1868, Historical Society of
Pennsylvania; De Forest, Union Officer in
the Reconstruction, 112-13; Gutman, Black
Family in Slavery and Freedom, 207-09.

35. Macrae, Americans at Home, 318.
For a discussion of how slaveholders tended
to regard marital and family ties, see Geno¬
vese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 452-58, 475-76,
and Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 341-
43.

36. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVDI: Unwritten History, 2.

37. Ibid., XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1),
423; Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 217.
For wartime disruptions of families, see Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, II: S.C. Narr.
(Part 2), 84; XVI: Va. Narr., 14; Gutman,
Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 22-
23, 371-75, 583-84; C. Peter Ripley, "The
Black Family in Transition: Louisiana,
1860-1865,” Journal of Southern History,
XLI (1975), 369-80.

38. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 80;
Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 344; Per¬
due et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 118;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II: S.C. Narr.
(Part 2), 235-36.

39. National Freedman, II (May 1866),
143; WPA, Negro in Virginia, 82-83. See
also Botume, First Days Amongst the Con¬
trabands, 157-58; New York Tribune, April
4, 1865; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVm: Unwritten History, 58; Reid, After
the War, 126-27; Gutman, Black Family in
Slavery and Freedom, 415.

40. 38 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc.
53, Preliminary Report Touching the Condi¬
tion and Management of Emancipated Ref¬
ugees ... by the American Freedmen ’s
Inquiry Commission, 3-4; Rev. Joseph War¬
ren, Extracts from Reports of Superinten¬
dents of Freedmen ..., First Series, May,
1864 (Vicksburg, 1864), 38, 48-41; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, XVIII: Unwritten
History, 124; New York Tribune, Sept. 8,

1865; Botume, First Days Amongst the Con¬
trabands, 158. For other examples of mass
marriages, see Haviland, A Woman’s Life-
Work, 267; New Orleans Tribune, Oct. 5,
1864; Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 33n.,
121 .

41. Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry
for March 4,1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
New York Times, March 2,1867.

42. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 160-61; Williamson, After
Slavery, 307-08; Wharton, Negro in Missis¬
sippi, 44; De Forest, Union Officer in the Re¬
construction, 56n.; New York Times, June 3,
1865; Gutman, Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom, 414, 417-18, 420,

43. Gutman, Black Family in Slavery
and Freedom, 421; Botume, First Days
Amongst the Contrabands, 154-56 (see also
162-63).

44. New York Times, Nov. 28, 1863.
See also Nordhoff, Freedmen of South
Carolina, 23; Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at
Home, 33-34; Andrews, War-Time Journal
of a Georgia Girl, 320.

45. Wharton, Negro in Mississippi,
228; Reid, After the War, 282n.; Gutman,
Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 389.

46. Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia
Plantation, 164; Clinton B. Fisk, Plain
Counsels for Freedmen: In Sixteen Brief Lec¬
tures (Boston, 1866), 28-35 (serialized in
Free Man’s Press, Austin, Texas, Aug. 15,22,
Sept. 5, 12, 1868); Armstrong and Ludlow,
Hampton and Its Students, 85.

47. George Parliss, Vicksburg, Miss.,
to Lt. Stuart Eldridge, April 9,1866; Thomas
H. Norton, Meridian, Miss., to Maj. A. W.
Preston, Aug. 3,1867; James DeGrey, Clin¬
ton, La., to William H. Webster, Sept. 10,
1867; and James DeGrey, Ms. Tri-Monthly
Report, Dec. 31,1867, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi and Louisi¬
ana (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau;
De Forest, Union Officer in the Reconstruc¬
tion, 102; Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home,
121 - 22 .

48. F. W. Loring and C. F. Atkinson,
Cotton Culture and the South Considered
with Reference to Emigration (Boston, 1869),
13,136; Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1370.
See also Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 4,15,20,137. See below,

586

Notes to pages 245-55

Chapter 8, for female labor and contract ne¬
gotiations.

49. Rawick (ed.), American Slave ,,
XIX: God Struck Me Dead, 135; Towne, Let¬
ters and Diary , 183-84.

50. Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Diary, en¬
try for Jan. 8,1867, Univ. of North Carolina;
A. Marshall to “My Dear Niece,” Jan. 20,
1867, Joseph Belknap Smith Papers, Duke
Univ. See also Avary, Dixie after the War,
192; Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruc¬
tion of Florida, 63; New York Times, April
29,1867.

51. Fisk, Plain Counsels for Freedmen,
25-35. For women employed in the cotton
barns, see, e.g., Botume, First Days Amongst
the Contrabands, 235-36.

52. Avary, Dixie after the War, 362.

53. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home,
123-24. See also The Bulletin (Louisville),
Sept. 24, 1881.

54. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 147-48.

55. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VDI: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 52; “Narrative of
W illiam Wells Brown,” in Osofsky (ed.), Put¬
tin' On Ole Massa, 217-18.

56. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” in
Katz (ed.), Five Slave Narratives, 14; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part
2), 177; Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 45-46. See also Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2),
27, and XVIH: Unwritten History, 46.

57. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 374; Heyward, Seed from Madagas¬
car, 97-98; Smedes, Memorials of a
Southern Planter, 71. For other examples,
see Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” in Katz
(ed.), Five Slave Narratives, 14, and D. E. H.
Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters,
226n.

58. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VIE: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 105; Swint (ed.),
Dear Ones at Home, 37; Reid, After the War,
532; Lester, To Be a Slave, 147.

59. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IX:
Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 120. For other examples
of ex-slaves who chose to take their former
master’s surname, see II: S.C. Narr. (Part 1),
327; IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 192,
(Part 3), 5; XI: Ark. Narr. (Part 7), 245.

60. Ibid., IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 192.

61. Ibid., IX: Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 105;
II: S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 117, 238, 266; IV:

Texas Narr. (Part 1), 54. For other examples,
see H and HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 14, (Part 3),
59-60; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 137, (Part 2),
237; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 296.

62. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 49; Quarles, Negro in the Civil
War, 288; National Freedman, II (May
1866), 144. For a discussion of naming prac¬
tices, both in slavery and in freedom, see
also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 443-50;
Gutman, Black Family in Slavery and Free¬
dom, 185-201, 230-56, and Williamson, Af¬
ter Slavery, 310-11.

63. D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith
Family Letters, 226; Andrews, War-Time
Journal of a Georgia Girl, 346-47.

64. Rawick, (ed.), American Slave, XII:
Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 351; Rainwater (ed.),
“Letters of James Lusk Alcorn,” 207.

65. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 4), 149; Christian
Recorder, March 17,1866. See also Friends’
Central Committee for the Relief of the
Emancipated Negroes, Letters from Joseph
Simpson (London, 1865), 23.

66. Bertram W. Doyle, The Etiquette
of Race Relations in the South: A Study in
Social Control (Chicago, 1937), 2, 3, 15, 53,
191; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony,
488; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XIV:
N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 22, 26; X: Ark. Narr.
(Part 5), 286; H: S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 95;
XVIII: Unwritten History, 43, 44; Swint
(ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 28; WPA, Negro in
Virginia, 216.

67. Louis Manigault, “Visit to *Gow-
rie’ and 'East Hermitage’ Plantations,”
March 1867, Manigault Plantation Records,
Univ. of North Carolina; Smedes, Memorials
of a Southern Planter, 217; Reid, After the
War, 568-69.

68. Christian Recorder, Nov. 18,1865;
Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 73; Higgin-
son, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 28-29;
Macrae, Americans at Home, 311; Andrews,
The South since the War, 229. See also
Botume, First Days Amongst the Contra¬
bands, 48.

69. New York Times, June 26, 1864;
Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 486; Dr.
Ethelred Philips to Dr. James J. Philips,
Oct. 24,1865, Nov. 8,1866, James J. Philips
Collection, Univ. of North Carolina.

Notes to pages 255-64

587

70. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home,
189.

71. "Carleton” to Boston Journal, Feb.
13,1865, reprinted in National Freedman, I
(April 1, 1865), 83.

72. Dennett, The South As It Is, 168-
69; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Com¬
mittee on Reconstruction, Part II, 108.

73. Trowbridge, The South, 238-89.

74. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails,
79; Dennett, The South As It Is, 42. See also
Reid, After the War, 419-20.

75. Reid, After the War, 84,152; Den¬
nett, The South As It Is, 116.

76. Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, 79.

77. Reid, After the War, 386-87,
387n.-88n.; Andrews, War-Time Journal of
a Georgia Girl, 251, 282, 322-23, 351; Tay¬
lor, Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia,
79-80; Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry for
July 13, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for
March 31, 1865, Univ. of South Carolina;
Andrews, The South since the War, 186-87;
New York Times, Nov. 28, 1863; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, XII: Ga. Narr. (Part
1), 325; Elias Horry Deas to Anne Deas, July
15, 1865, Deas Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; Francis W. Dawson to [Joseph A.
Reeks], June 13,1865, F. W. Dawson Papers,
Duke Univ.; Francis D. Richardson to Gen.
St. John R. Liddell, July 31, 1866, John R.
Liddell and Family Papers, Louisiana State
Univ.

78. Dennett, The South As It Is, 137;
Henry W. Ravenel to [Augustin Louis] Ta-
veau, June 27, 1865, A. L. Taveau Papers,
Duke Univ.

79. Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 351; Reid, After the War,
410n.-lln. See also Dennett, The South As
It Is, 183.

80. John Hammond Moore (ed.), The
Juhl Letters to the Charleston Courier: A
View of the South, 1865-1871 (Athens, Ga.,
1974) (Aug. 24,1865, and Jan. 26,1866), 29-
30, 72; Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Diary, entry
for July 20, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
Dr. Ethelred Philips to Dr. James J. Philips,
Nov. 8, 1866, James J. Philips Collection,
Univ. of North Carolina.

81. J. H. Young to James W. White,

Aug. 5,1867, White Papers, Univ. of North
Carolina

82. Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, Race
Distinctions in American Law (New York,
1911), 209; Wharton, Negro in Mississippi,
230; Workingman *s Advocate, July 21,1866.

83. Avary, Dixie after the War, 194.

84. New Orleans Tribune, Jan. 13,
Feb. 28, June 25, Aug. 8, 1865; Loyal Geor¬
gian, July 6, 1867; Freedman’s Press, July
18, 1868; New York Times, Aug. 17, 1865,
March 22, June 2, 1866, April 29, May 18,
June 19,1867; New York Tribune, July 21,
Aug. 22, 1865; Reid, After the War, 386n.,
421; Andrews, The South since the War, 11;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 293; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 352; Alrutheus A. Tay¬
lor, The Negro in Tennessee, 1865-1880
(Washington, D.C., 1941), 226-27; Taylor,
Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, 52.
For an example of integrated travel preced¬
ing black agitation on the subject, see the
protest of a white Virginian after traveling
by rail from Pittsburgh to Richmond, as
quoted in New York Times, April 16,1866.

85. Stephenson, Race Distinctions in
American Law, 208-09; American Freed¬
man, I (July 1866), 59; William H. Dixon,
New America (2 vols.; London, 1867), II, 330-
32; Reid, After the War, 386n., 421; Dennett,
The South As It Is, 293; Richmond Enquirer,
Sept. 7, 1867, as quoted in Taylor, Negro in
the Reconstruction of Virginia, 52-53.

86. New Orleans Tribune, May 16,
1867; New York Times, Feb. 25, March 5,
1866; Taylor, Negro in the Reconstruction of
Virginia, 53-54; Colored American, Dec. 30,

1865.

87. Wharton, Negro in Mississippi,
232-33; The Confederate Records of the State
of Georgia (5 vols.; Atlanta, 1909), IV, 568;
Trowbridge, The South, 161. For a denial of
discrimination in "lunatic asylums” in New
Orleans, see New Orleans Tribune, Oct. 19,

1866.

88. Loyal Georgian, July 6,1867; New
Orleans Tribune, Aug. 8,1865; Williamson,
After Slavery, 275-76.

89. New Orleans Tribune, May 5,

1867. For agitation in other cities, see, e.g..
Loyal Georgian, July 6, 1867 (Savannah);
Christian Recorder, June 2, 1866 (Balti¬
more); New York Times, July 9, 1867 (Mo¬
bile), May 27, 1867 (Nashville).

588

Notes to pages 264-70

90. S. W. Ramsay, Office of the
Charleston City Railway Company, Report
of the Board of Directors, April 29,1867, and
John S. Riggs to R. K. Scott, May 3, 1867,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina (Letters Received), Freed-
men’s Bureau; New Orleans Tribune, May 5,
28,1867; New York Times, Jan. 7, March 27,
28, April 2,5, May 27,1867; Swint (ed.), Dear
Ones at Home, 221, 225; Williamson, After
Slavery, 281-83.

91. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 241-42;
Taylor, Negro in the Reconstruction of Vir¬
ginia., 52; New York Times, May 1, 4, 8,
1867; New Orleans Tribune, July 8, 1867.
For litigation and rulings by Union officers,
see New Orleans Tribune, May 8, July 7,
1867; Freedman’s Press, July 18, 1868; Na¬
tional Freedman, I (Dec. 15,1865), 362; New
York Times, April 21, 22, May 18, June 19,
July 10, Aug. 21, Sept. 8, 21, 1867.

92. New Orleans Tribune, Jan. 13,
Feb. 28, May 21, June 25, Aug. 8,20,25,29,
31, Sept. 1,1865, April 30, May 1, 4, 7, 8, 9,
1867; New York Times, Nov. 5, 20, 1862,
May 8,16,1867; J. C. Reid, Superintendent
of tibe New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad
Company, New Orleans, to Hon. E. Heath,
Mayor of New Orleans, May 5,1867, Pierre
G. T. Beauregard Papers, Louisiana State
Univ.

93. Macrae, Americans at Home, 297.

94. Trowbridge, The South, 352-53.

95. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 21-22.

96. New York Times, Sept. 17, 1865;
New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 15, 1865; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, Part II, 56.

97. De Forest, Union Officer in the Re¬
construction, 132; Christian Recorder, Feb.
24, 1866. Turner’s remarks were also
printed in Colored American, Jan. 13,1866.
For similar sentiments, see Christian Re¬
corder, Aug. 27,1864, Feb. 18,1865.

98. Colored American, Jan. 6, 1866.

99. Avary, Dixie after the War, 377;
New York Times, Feb. 4, 1866; Edmund
Rhett to Maj. Gen. Scott, Aug. 12, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina (Letters Received), Freed-
men’s Bureau.

100. Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 223; Ravenel, Private Journal,
246. For s im ilar expressions of alarm over

the stationing of black troops in their vicin¬
ity, see Dennett, The South As It Is, 32-33;
National Freedman, I (Sept. 15, 1865), 264;
Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 170; An¬
drews, War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl,
231-32, 268-64, 338; D. E. H. Smith (ed.),
Mason Smith Family Letters, 170; Emma E.
Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for April 7, 1865,
Univ. of South Carolina; Grace B. Elmore,
Ms. Diary, entry for July 13,1865, Univ. of
North Carolina; Dr. Ethelred Philips to Dr.
James J. Philips, Aug. 2,1865, James J. Phi¬
lips Collection, Univ. of North Carolina

101. Reid, After the War, 422n., 279.
For other examples of conflict between re¬
turning Confederate soldiers and black
troops, see Charles E. Cauthen (ed.), Family
Letters of the Three Wade Hamptons, 1782-
1901 (Columbia, S.C., 1953), 129-30; An¬
drews, The South since the War, 28; New
York Times, May 23, 26, 28,1865.

102. D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith
Family Letters, 181; Ravenel, Private Jour¬
nal, 245, 251; Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary,
entry for March 31, 1865, Univ. of South
Carolina; Petition of 18 Planters, Pineville,
Charleston District, Sept. 1,1865, Trenholm
Papers, Univ. ofNorth Carolina; 39 Cong., 1
Sess., Report of the Joint Committee on Re¬
construction, Part II, 178; New York Times,
Oct. 11, 1865; Evans, Ballots and Fence
Rails, 79-80,81; J. G. De Roulhac Hamilton,
Reconstruction in North Carolina (New
York, 1914), 158-61; Jack D. L. Holmes,
"The Underlying Causes of the Memphis
Race Riot of 1866,” Tennessee Historical Re¬
view, XVH (1958), 217.

103. Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails,
79n.; Charles W. Ramsdell, Reconstruction
in Texas (New York, 1910), 130-31; An¬
drews, The South since the War, 221.

104. Ravenel, Private Journal, 245-
46,247,251; Andrews, War-Time Journal of
a Georgia Girl, 362-63; Rev. John Hamilton
Cornish, Ms. Diary, entry for June 18,1865,
Univ. of North Carolina.

105. John W. Burbidge to Joseph
Glover, July 28,1865, Glover-North Papers,
Univ. of South Carolina; E. M. Jenkins and
other citizens to Bvt. Maj. Gen. R. K. Scott,
June 13,1866, with endorsement by Maj. J.
E. Cornelius; Frederick Reed to Bvt. Maj.
Gen. R. K. Scott, June 13, 1866, Records
of the Assistant Commissioners, South

Notes to pages 270-78

589

Carolina (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau. See also Maj. George D. Reynolds to Lt.
Stuart Eldridge, Oct. 5,1865, Records of the
Assistant Commissioners, Mississippi (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 27, Reports
of the Assistant Commissioners of the Freed-
men's Bureau [1865-1866], 126.

106. Christian Recorder, , Sept. 9, Oct.
21, 1865. For racial clashes among Union
soldiers, see John C. Chavis to James Red-
path [June 16, 1865], Univ. of South
Carolina; New York Times, , July 24, 1865,
May 17, 1866; Williamson, After Slavery ;
258; Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 63-64;
Ravenel, Private Journal , 246; Dennett, The
South As It Is, 193-94, 255.

107. Christian Recorder, Sept. 9,1865;
Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 65.

108. Christian Recorder, Sept. 9,1865;
Christian A. Fleetwood to Dr. James Hall,
June 8,1865, Carter G. Woodson Collection,
Library of Congress.

109. Ravenel, Private Journal, 274,
288-89; Nevins, War for the Union: The Or¬
ganized War to Victory, 1864-1865, 367;
New York Times, Oct. 17,1866.

110. Dennett, The South As It Is, 319;
Christian Recorder, Dec. 2, 1865; D. E. H.
Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters,
232-33; A. R. Salley to "My Dear Aunt,”
Nov. 13, 1865, Bruce, Jones, Murchison Pa¬
pers, Univ. of South Carolina.

111. Christian Recorder, Sept. 9, Aug.
19,1865; A. H. Haines to President Andrew
Johnson, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, South Carolina (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, XVIII: Unwritten History, 173. For
assaults on discharged black soldiers, see
New Orleans Tribune, July 26, 28, Aug. 31,
1865; New York Times, June 21, 1866; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freed¬
men’s Bureau, 203, 236, 237, 238; Senate
Exec. Doc. 27, Reports of the Assistant Com¬
missioners of the Freedmen’s Bureau [1865-
1866], 6.

112. Rawick, (ed.), American Slave,
XVIH: Unwritten History, 127; South
Carolina Leader (Charleston), March 31,
1866. For black Union veterans who re¬
turned to the old plantations, see Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part

3), 155; VH: Okla. Narr., .253; XVI: Kansas
Narr., 9.

113. Reid, After the War, 558-62.

114. New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 31,
1865. "When de war ended, I goes back to my
mastah and he treated me like his brother.
Guess he wuz scared of me ’cause I had so
much ammunition on me.” Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, XVI: Va. Narr., 43.

115. Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 341-43.

116. Reid, After the War, 352.

117. Trowbridge, The South, 314; Den¬
nett, The South As It Is, 194.

118. Andrews, The South since the
War, 100; Trowbridge, The South, 429-30.

119. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part HI,
146; House Exec. Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau, 201-07. The reports of assaults and
murders are voluminous, not all of them eas¬
ily verifiable. See, e.g., 39 Cong., 1 Sess.,
Report of the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction, Part El, 8-9, 146; House
Exec. Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bureau, 201-07,
236-38, 248-49; George L. Childs, Office of
the Provost Court, Charlottesville, Va., Sept.
20, 1865, Brock Collection, Henry E. Hunt¬
ington Library; Bvt. Col. A. E. Niles, Kings-
tree, S.C., to Bvt. Maj. Gen. R. K. Scott, Dec.
10,1866, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, South Carolina (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; Letters from Anony¬
mous (colored), Macon, Ga., April 13,1866,
Rebecca Lightfoot (freedwoman), Augusta,
Ga., March 24, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau,
Georgia (Registers of Letters Received);
Trowbridge, The South, 463, 581; Dennett,
The South As It Is, 125-26,195-96, 221-22;
New Orleans Tribune, July 14, Aug. 3,1865;
New York Times, Oct. 22,1865, Jan. 8, Feb.
12,27, Oct. 31,1866, Jan. 12, Feb. 4, Aug. 5,
22, 30, Dec. 26, 1867. For reports of whites
committing rape on black women, see Loyal
Georgian, Jan. 27, Oct. 13,1866; 39 Cong., 1
Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau, 204, 207.

120. Dennett, The South As It Is, 110;
Loyal Georgian, Oct. 13,1866. For other ex¬
pressions of concern by native whites, see R.
W, Flournoy, New Albany, Miss., to Rep.
Thaddeus Stevens, Nov. 20, 1865, Stevens
Papers, Library of Congress; Trowbridge,
The South, 499-500.

590

Notes to pages 278-84

121. Trowbridge, The South, 314,576;
39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Com¬
mittee on Reconstruction, Part II, 127, Part
HI, 8; House Exec. Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau, 248-49; Williamson, After Slavery, 97.

122. Christian Recorder, June 23,
1866; Albert, House of Bondage, 139-40. For
examples of organized violence, see Lt. Col.
H. R. BrinkerhofF, Clinton, Miss., to Maj.
Gen. 0. 0. Howard, July 8,1865, Records of
the Assistant Commissioners, Mississippi
(Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freed¬
men’s Bureau, 201-06,237-38; Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part HI,
146; Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 343; Andrews, The South since
the War, 118, 220; Williamson, After Slav¬
ery, 97; Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruc¬
tion of Florida, 164; New York Times, May
10, July 6, Aug. 29, 1866, Jan. 4, May 16,
1867.

123. Cornelia P. Spencer to Eliza
North, March 10,1866, in Chamberlain, Old
Days in Chapel Hill, 131; Trowbridge, The
South, 572; Moore (ed.), The Juki Letters
(July 22,1865), 23.

124. Dennett, The South As It Is, 261;
Loyal Georgian, Oct. 13, 1865; Trowbridge,
The South, 499-500.

125. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home,
165-69; Ravenel, Private Journal, 287-89;
Williamson, After Slavery, 258-59; Taylor,
Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, 83;
New Orleans Tribune, May 10,12,14,1867;
New York Times, July 24,1865, April 3,17,
May 3, June 26, July 25, Aug. 20,1866.

126. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Report
101, Memphis Riots and Massacres (Wash¬
ington, D.C., 1866); William S. McFeely,
Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard
and the Freedmen (New Haven, 1968), 274-
82; Holmes, "The Underlying Causes of the
Memphis Race Riot of 1866,” 195-221;
American Freedman, I (July 1866), 50-51;
New York Times, May 3,4,7,10,11,17, June
29, July 26, 1866; Taylor, Negro in Tennes¬
see, 85-87.

127. 39 Cong., 2 Sess., House Report
16, New Orleans Riots (Washington, D.C.,
1866); McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 282-87;
New York Times, July 29, 31, Aug. 1,4, 5, 7,
8,10,11,16, 17, 24, Oct. 14,1866.

128. Dennett, The South As It Is, 150-
51.

129. On March 22, 1865, the New Or¬
leans Tribune concluded that during the
last twenty years of slavery, colored resi¬
dents had fared better before the courts
than at the present time. For the legal sys¬
tem and slaves, see Stampp, The Peculiar
Institution, 217-31.

130. New York Times, July 29, 1866;
David Humphreys to Bvt. Maj. Gen.
Swayne, Nov. 25,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Alabama (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Coulter,
"Slavery and Freedom in Athens, Georgia,
1860-66,” in Miller and Genovese (eds.).
Plantation, Town, and County, 361.

131. New York Times, Oct. 28, 1866;
Julius J. Fleming to Gen. Scott, Sept. 15,
1866, Records of the Assistant Co mmis sion-
ers, South Carolina (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

132. De Forest, Union Officer in the
Reconstruction, 1-14. For the varied record
of the provost courts and the Freedmen’s
Bureau in meting out equal justice, see Capt.
George R. Hurlbut to Capt. George L. Childs,
Sept. 30, 1865, and Col. Orlando Brown to
Capt. Frank P. Crandon, Aug. 31, 1865,
Brock Collection, Henry E. Huntington Li¬
brary; Henry Crocheron et al. to Gen
Swayne, Nov. 24,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Alabama; Julius J.
Fleming to Gen. Scott, Sept. 15, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina; Bvt. Maj. Thomas H. Nor¬
ton to Maj. A. W. Preston, Aug. 3, 1867,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau; New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 14,
1865; Trowbridge, The South, 446; Dennett,
The South As It Is, 223; William W. Rogers,
Thomas County, 1865-1900 (Tallahassee,
1973), 407; Williamson, After Slavery, 327;
Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction of
Florida, 41-42, 51-52; Martin Abbott, The
Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina,
1865-1872 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), 100-02;
McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 267-73;
George R. Bentley, A History of the Freed¬
men’s Bureau (Philadelphia, 1955), 152-68.

133. William Daniel to John A. Nee¬
dles, May 6, 1865, Pennsylvania Society for

Notes to pages 285-90

591

Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Histori¬
cal Society of Pennsylvania; John Baker to
Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Woods, May 20,1866,
and Bvt. Maj. Thomas H. Norton to Maj. A.
W. Preston, Aug. 3,1867, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, Mississippi; Julius J.
Fleming to Gen. Scott, Sept. 15, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina (Letters Received), Freed-
men’s Bureau; 39 Cong., 2 Sess., Senate
Exec. Doc. 6, Reports of the Assistant Com¬
missioners of Freedmen (Washington, D.C.,
1867), 32,60,123; Freedmen’s Affairs in Ken¬
tucky and Tennessee, Report of Brevet Major
General Carlin ... (Washington, D.C., 1868),
30; Report of the Joint Committee on Recon¬
struction, Part HI, 8; New Orleans Tribune,
Nov. 29,1865; Loyal Georgian, Feb, 24,1866;
New York Times, Sept. 26, 1866, April 14,
1867; Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruc¬
tion of Florida, 40,44-46,47-48; Taylor, Ne¬
gro in Tennessee, 41.

134. Trowbridge, The South, 435-36;
Macrae, Americans at Home, 139.

135. New York Times, July 29, 1866;
Trowbridge, The South, 464, 446-47.

136. New York Times, Aug. 30, 1867;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 221; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 463; 39 Cong., 1 Sess.,
Report of the Joint Committee on Recon¬
struction, Part III, 8; House Exec. Doc. 70,
Freedmen’s Bureau, 201; Richardson, Negro
in the Reconstruction of Florida, 164; Bvt.
Col. A. E. Niles to Bvt. Maj. Gen. R. K. Scott,
Dec. 10,1866, Records of the Assistant Com¬
missioners, South Carolina; Capt. W. G.
Wedemeyer to Bvt. Maj. S. G. Greene, July
25,1868, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

137. Richardson, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Florida, 40-41, 44; Trowbridge,
The South, 499; Stampp, The Peculiar Insti¬
tution, 220.

138. New Orleans Tribune, July 14,
Nov. 29, 1865; Dennett, The South As It Is,
128; Reid, After the War, 51n.-52n.; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, Part II, 213. See also Ira
Pettibone to "Bro. Whitney/’ Feb. 22,1865,
American Missionary Assn. Archives.

139. Andrews, The South since the
War, 189; Dennett, The South As It Is, 75.

See also Dennett, The South As It Is, 111,
157,168,181; New York Times, Sept. 10, Oct.

I, 1865; Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 134-
35.

140. Dennett, The South As It Is, 54,

132.

141. Convention of the Freedmen of
North Carolina (Raleigh, 1865), 5; Thomas
W. Knox, Camp-fire and Cotton Field: South¬
ern Adventure in Time of War (New York,
1865), 337. For examples of black jurymen,
see Colored American, Dec. 30, 1865; New
Orleans Tribune, July 4, 1867; New York
Times, Aug. 25, 30, Sept. 1, Oct. 20, 1867;
Williamson, After Slavery, 329; Wharton,
Negro in Mississippi, 137.

142. William V. Turner to Gen. Wager
Swayne, Nov. 17,1865, and Prince Murell et
al. to Gen. Wager Swayne, Dec. 17, 1865,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners, Al¬
abama (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau; New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 11, Dec. 27,

1865, Sept. 2, 1866; Christian Recorder,
Sept. 22,1866. For protests of police abuses,
see also C. P. Head et al., Vicksburg, to Brig.
Gen. Samuel Thomas, April 17, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received); New Orleans
Tribune, May 10, 1865; 39 Cong., 1 Sess.,
Report of the Joint Committee on Recon¬
struction, Part II, 185. For examples ofblack
police, see New Orleans Tribune, June 4, 6,

II, July 3, 1867; New York Times, Aug. 3,
10, Oct. 28, 1867. On the need for black
police, see New Orleans Tribune, May 10,
1867.

143. Loyal Georgian, Feb. 24, 1866;
New Orleans Tribune, July 14,1865.

144. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home,
169; New Orleans Tribune, March 22, June
7, July 18, 26, Aug. 31,1865, Aug. 31, Sept.
1, 1866.

145. William Johnson to his parents,
July 12,1867, Main File, Henry E. Hunting-
ton Library; Letter from L. J. Leavy, July 4,

1866, Freedmen’s Bureau, Georgia (Regis¬
ters of Letters Received); New York Times,
April 2,1866; "Report of the Commissioner
of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and
Abandoned Lands, November 1, 1866,” in
Report of the Secretary of War (Washington,
D.C., 1867), Appendix, 733; Rev. Horace
James, Annual Report of the Superintendent

592

Notes to pages 290-304

of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864 ...
(Boston, n.d.), 21. See also New York Times,
May 27, July 1,1866.

146. James McMahon, City Clerk, Co¬
lumbia, to Col. Mansfield, May 29,1866; Col.

Mansfield to Col. H. W. Smith, May 30,1866;
Letter from "a colored woman/’ May 16,
1866, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, South Carolina (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

Chapter Six: The Feel of Freedom: Moving About

1. Eppes, Negro of the Old South, 134.

2. Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the
Wheat, 213.

3. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
1292-93.

4. Ella Gertrude (Clanton) Thomas,
Ms. Journal, entries for Dec. 12,1864, May
7 to Oct. 9,1865, Sept. 17,1866, Duke Univ.

5. A. R. Salley to "My Dear Aunt,”
Nov. 13,1865, Bruce, Jones, Murchison Pa¬
pers, Univ. of South Carolina.

6. Eppes, Negro of the Old South, 134.

7. Dr. Ethelred Philips to Dr. James J.
Philips, Jan. 21,1866, James J. Philips Col¬
lection, Univ. of North Carolina; Ball, The
State That Forgot, 128; Emma E. Holmes,
Ms. Diary, entry for June 15,1865, Univ. of
South Carolina. For freed slaves who
equated departure with freedom, see also
Duncan McLaurin to Gov. E. Hawley, May
23,1866, McLaurin Papers, Duke Univ.; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, Part n, 99,187, Part HI,
118, 173; National Freedman, I (Nov. 15,
1865), 327; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVH: Fla. Narr., 103,

8. Mrs. Edward Smith Tennent to "My
Dear Aunt” [Hattie Taylor], July 2,1865, Dr.
Edward Smith Tennent Papers, Univ. of
South Carolina. For similar laments, see
Hope L. Jones to "Aunt,” Feb. 28, 1866,
Bruce, Jones, Murchison Papers, and Emma
E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, Aug. 22, 1865, Univ.
of South Carolina; Chamberlain, Old Days
in Chapel Hill, 88; Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1248,1274; Ravenel, Private Journal,
244; D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Fam¬
ily Letters, 205; New York Times, March 9,
1865; Peter Kolchin, First Freedom: The Re¬
sponses of Alabama’s Blacks to Emancipa¬
tion and Reconstruction (Westport, Conn.,
1972), 6.

9. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VIII:
Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 14. See also H: S.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 142; IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 1),
162, 209, (Part 3), 192, (Part 4), 1.

10. Ibid., IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 81-
85; Armstrong, OldMassa’sPeople, 319. See
also Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work, 266;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XIV: N.C.
Narr. (Part 1), 215.

11. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 293; Sarah M. Payne
to Mary M. Clendenin, Sept. 30, 1865, His¬
torical Society of Pennsylvania; Dennett,
The South As It Is, 13-14.

12. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 538;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XV: N.C.
Narr. (Part 2), 290; XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 3),
162. See also EE: S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 84; VII:
Miss. Narr., 28, 29-30.

13. Trowbridge, The South, 209; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, IX: Ark. Narr.
(Part 4), 183-84.

14. Andrews, The South since the War,
25-26.

15. New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 12,

1865.

16. Eppes, Through Some Eventful
Years, 284-85; Avary, Dixie after the War,
188.

17. Simkins and Patton, Women of the
Confederacy, 251; LeConte, When the World
Ended, 41, 112.

18. Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry
for May 30, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
Mrs. Mary Jones to Mrs. Mary S. Mallard,
Nov. 17, 1865, in Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1308.

19. Eppes, Through Some Eventful
Years, 279-80, 285-86.

20. See, e.g., Dennett, The South As It
Is, 127-28; National Freedman, I (July 15,
1865), 182; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 60.

21. Dennett, The South As It Is, 223;
39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freed¬
men’s Bureau, 388-89; New York Times,
Aug. 2,1865.

22. New York Times, Aug. 31, 1865,
April 9,1866. See also 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Re¬
port of the Joint Committee on Reconstruc-

Notes to pages 304-13

593

tion, Part III, 142. On the role of the Union
Army and the Freedmen *s Bureau, see below,
Chapters 7 and 8.

23. Ella Gertrude (Clanton) Thomas,
Ms. Journal, entry for May 1865, Duke
Univ.

24. H. R. BrinkerhofF to Maj. Gen. O.
O. Howard, July 8,1865, John L. Barnett to
"Colonel,” June 27,1865, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, Mississippi and
North Carolina (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau. See also Trowbridge, The
South, 332, 461.

25. Dennett, The South As It Is, 364.

26. Ibid., 226-27, 364-65. See also An¬
drews, The South since the War, 207, 221;
Botume, First Days Amongst the Contra¬
bands, 209-10.

27. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc.
27, Reports of the Assistant Commissioners
of the Freedmen’s Bureau [1865-1866], 85;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 1), 159; New York Tribune, July
25, 1865.

28. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI:
Ala. Narr., 102; VH: Miss. Narr., 154-55; IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 14-16. See also Leigh,
Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, 14, 33-
35.

29. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 6-7; XIH: Ga. Narr.
(Part 3), 207-08; De Forest, Union Officer in
the Reconstruction, 36-37. See also Dennett,
The South As It Is, 229, and Botume, First
Days Amongst the Contrabands, 209-10.

30. New York Times, Nov. 28, 1863;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, X: Ark. Narr.
(Part 5), 17,18; C. W. Clarke to Col. Samuel
Thomas, June 29,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau.

31. Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment, 266; New York Tribune, Nov. 10,
1865. See also New York Times, Aug. 5,
1864, Sept. 29,1865.

32. Williamson, After Slavery, 110; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, Part II, 56. See also Blas-
singame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 384. On the
postwar black conventions, see below, Chap¬
ter 10.

33. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 300; Richardson, Negro
in the Reconstruction of Florida, 75-78;

Trowbridge, The South, 460. On interstate
migration patterns, see Wharton, Negro in
Mississippi, 107; Williamson, After Slavery,
108-09; Richardson, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Florida, 75-76; Kolchin, First
Freedom, 20-21; De Forest, Union Officer in
the Reconstruction, 130-31; Moore (ed.), The
Juki Letters, 143. In mid-1866, Oliver O.
Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau,
authorized transportation for delegates
elected by the freedmen of Roanoke Island
to visit plantations in Texas and explore em¬
ployment opportunities there. If the investi¬
gation justified migration, freedmen in "the
large and destitute settlements” would then
be induced to move. O. O. Howard to Bvt.
Maj. Gen. J. Robinson, Aug. 22, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
North Carolina (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau.

34. Reid, After the War, 562-63; Ra¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, XI: Mo. Narr.,
117; XIH: Ga. Narr. (Part 4), 90-91.

35. Wharton, Negro in Mississippi,
109; Kolchin, First Freedom, 12-19, 22-23.

36. Andrews, The South since the War,
350-52.

37. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 133. See also Macrae,
Americans at Home, 324.

38. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 124; V: Texas Narr.
(Part 4), 39; Trowbridge, The South, 155-56;
Weymouth T. Jordan, Hugh Davis and His
Alabama Plantation (University, Ala.,
1948), 160; Ephraim M. Anderson, Memoirs:
Historical and Personal (St. Louis, 1868),
364; George Parliss to Stuart Eldridge, April
9, 1866, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau. See also National
Freedman, I (Nov. 15,1865), 327; Perdue et
al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 262.

39. Loyal Georgian, March 3, 1866;
Reid, After the War, 69; New York Times,
Sept. 2, 1865.

40. New York Times, Dec. 10,1865.

41. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 9,13-14; Wharton, Ne¬
gro in Mississippi, 126-27,128; Williamson,
After Slavery, 38,159-62; Taylor, Negro in
Tennessee, 141-42; The Union (New Or¬
leans), July 14, 1863.

42. Dew, Ironmaker to the Confeder-

594

Notes to pages 313-19

acy, 313-14. With the end of the war, the
need to reconstruct shattered railroad
tracks and build new lines produced imme¬
diate opportunities for freedmen to leave
the fields for work that would be more remu¬
nerative. See, e.g., Loring and Atkinson, Cot¬
ton Culture and the South, 13-14, 17; New
York Times, Feb. 24, 1867; Reid, After the
War, 331; Capt. J. H. Weber to Col. Samuel
Thomas, July 1,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Taylor, Negro
in the Reconstruction of Virginia, 114; Tay¬
lor, Negro in Tennessee, 152-53; Wharton,
Negro in Mississippi, 125.

43. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XVI: Va. Narr., 7-8, 55-56.

44. Wharton, Negro in Mississippi,
106-07; Kolchin, First Freedom, 10; Taylor,
Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, 32-
34; Williamson, After Slavery, 108; Nevins,
War for the Union: The Organized War,
1863-1864, 363-64; New York Times, Aug.
6, 1865.

45. Josiah Gorgas, Ms. Journal, entry
for June 2, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
Kolchin, First Freedom, 10.

46. Ravenel, Private Journal, 244;
Margaret L. Montgomery (ed.), ''Alabama
Freedmen: Some Reconstruction Docu¬
ments,” Phylon, Xm (3rd Quarter 1952),
145; Kolchin, First Freedom, 7; Myers (ed.),
Children of Pride, 1263, 1292; New York
Times, July 17, 1865; Elias Horry Deas to
Anne Deas, Aug. 12, 1865, Deas Papers,
Univ. of South Carolina; Capt. William A.
Poillon to Brig. Gen. Wager Swayne, Nov.

1865, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, Alabama (Letters Received), Freed-
men’s Bureau.

47. Baton Rouge Advocate, Feb. 21,

1866, quoted in Dennett, The South As It Is,
343-44; Memphis Daily Avalanche, March
15, 1866, quoted in Holmes, "The Underly¬
ing Causes of the Memphis Race Riot of
1866,” 203n. See also New York Times, Sept.
1, 1865; Elias Horry Deas to Anne Deas,
Aug. 12,1865, Deas Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; Edward Lynch to Joseph Glover [c.
June 1865], Glover-North Papers, Univ. of
South Carolina; Wharton, Negro in Missis¬
sippi, 53; Richardson, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Florida, 33-34.

48. Elias Horry Deas to Anne Deas,

Aug. 12, 1865, Deas Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; New York Times, Sept. 2, 1865;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for June
15,1865, Univ. of South Carolina.

49. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry
for End of May 1865, Univ. of South
Carolina; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XHI: Ga. Narr. (Part 4), 235.

50. Elias Horry Deas to Anne Deas,
July, Aug. 12, 1865, Deas Papers, Univ. of
South Carolina.

51. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc.
70, Freedmen’s Bureau, 231.

52. Loyal Georgian, April 10, 1867;
Christian Recorder, Dec. 16,1865; Black Re¬
publican, April 29,1865. For similar advice,
see Colored Tennessean, Oct. 14, 1865.

53. New York Tribune, June 12,17,27,
July 16, Aug. 8,1865; New York Times, June
15, 1865; New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 26,
1865.

54. Christian Recorder, July 21,1866.
See also, e.g., ibid,, June 10, July 8, 1865;
New Orleans Tribune, July 8, 1865; New
York Times, June 11, 1865, July 29, 1866;
The Union, April 9, 1864.

55. New York Times, July 7, 1865;
Henry Crocheron et al. to Gen. Swayne,
Nov. 24,1865, Records of the Assistant Com¬
missioners, Alabama (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; Christian Recorder,
June 10, 1865. For a black protest meeting
in Selma, Ala., see New York Times, Nov.
12, 1865.

56. Kolchin, First Freedom, 7; New Or¬
leans Tribune, July 22, 26, 29, 1865; 39
Cong., 2 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 6, Reports
of the Assistant Commissioners of Freedmen,
129; New York Times, Oct. 28, 1865.

57. The Union, April 9,1864; New Or¬
leans Tribune, Aug. 18, 1864, July 16, 26,
1865; New York Times, Feb. 2, 1863, Sept.
28, Nov. 13,1865; New York Tribune, June
12,1865; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc.
27, Reports of the Assistant Commissioners
of the Freedmen's Bureau [1865-1866], 51;
39 Cong., 2 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 6, Re¬
ports of the Assistant Commissioners of
Freedmen, 129.

58. Christian Recorder, July 1, 1865;
National Freedman, I (Aug. 15, 1865), 200;
New York Times, June 25, July 16,1865; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 27, Reports
of the Assistant Commissioners of the Freed-

Notes to pages 319-28

595

men’s Bureau [1865-1866], 8; New Orleans
Tribune, , Oct. 12,1865.

59. Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 53;
Kolchin, First Freedom, 7.

60. Seleg G. Wright to Rev. George
Whipple, April 1, 7,1864; "An Officer of the
U.S.A.” [apparently S. G. Wright], April 4,

1864, Ms. article intended for release to
newspaper, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; Christian Recorder, July 1,1865. See
also "Abstract of a Report of a Visit to Nat¬
chez,” in Warren, Extracts from Reports of
Superintendents of Freedmen.

61. New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 8,

1865.

62. Prince Murell et al., Tuscaloosa,
Ala., Dec. 17,1865; C. P. Head et al., Vicks¬
burg, to Brig. Gen. Samuel Thomas, April
17,1866; Jim Leigh et al., Tuscumbia, Ala.,
Nov. 27,1865, Records of the Assistant Com¬
missioners, Alabama and Mississippi (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau.

63. Trowbridge, The South, 453-54;
New York Times, Aug. 6,1865 (quoting the
Petersburg Daily Index). See also New York
Times, June 16, Aug. 6, 1865, Dec. 4, 1866;
Ravenel, Private Journal, 238-39; Wharton,
Negro in Mississippi, 127; Williamson, After
Slavery, 162; Charles H. Wesley, Negro La¬
bor in the United States, 1850-1925 (New
York, 1927), 218.

64. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 277.

65. See, e.g., ibid., IV and V: Texas
Narr. (Part 1), 280, (Part 2), 142, (Part 4), 77;
VI: Ala. Narr, 280-81,420; VIII: Ark. Narr.
(Part 2), 63-64; XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 177,
(Part 4), 172; 39 Cong, 1 Sess, Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part 13,
99.

66. 39 Cong, 1 Sess, Senate Exec. Doc.
27, Reports of the Assistant Commissioners
of the Freedmen’s Bureau [1865-1866], 65.

67. Lt. Col. H. R. Brinkerhoff to Maj.
Gen. O. O. Howard, July 8,1865, Records of
the Assistant Commissioners, Mississippi
(Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; 39
Cong, 1 Sess, House Exec. Doc. 70, Freed¬
men’s Bureau, 288; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 41.

68. Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and
Reconstruction in Alabama (New York,
1905), 272; Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 407; III: S.C. Narr.

(Part 3), 265-66. For movement back to the
plantations, see also Trowbridge, The South,
251-52; 39 Cong, 1 Sess, Senate Exec. Doc.
27, Reports of the Assistant Commissioners
of the Freedmen’s Bureau [1865-1866], 13;
Capt. J. H. Weber to Col. Samuel Thomas,
July 1,1865, Records of the Assistant Com¬
missioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1296; Williamson, After Slavery, 40-
41.

69. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 407; Trowbridge,
The South, 537-38.

70. Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia
Plantation, 22; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie,
531; 39 Cong, 1 Sess, Report of the Joint
Committee on Reconstruction, Part II, 80.
See also Avary, Dixie after the War, 185-86;
Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice Plan¬
tation, 216; Trowbridge, The South, 491-
92.

71. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 26.

72. Andrews, The South since the War,
25; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat,
213.

73. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 105; XTV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 178. See also V: Texas Narr. (Part
4), 32.

74. Ibid., VH: Miss. Narr, 173; IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 88; Perdue et al. (eds.),
Weevils in the Wheat, 228-29.

75. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XTV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 300; XHI: Ga. Narr.
(Part 3), 64. For similar recollections, see,
e.g, n and HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 334^35,
(Part 2), 263, (Part 3), 236-37, (Part 4), 80; IV
and V: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 3, (Part 2), 128,
161-62, (Part 3), 130, (Part 4), 72; VH: Okla.
Narr, 340; Miss. Narr, 154; XII and XIII:
Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 263, (Part 3), 39; XIV:
N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 172, 239; XVII: Fla.
Narr, 376.

76. Ibid., VHI: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 14,
189; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 65.

77. Ibid., H: S.C. Narr. (Part 2), 216.
For variations of this theme, see also IV and
V: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 64-65, (Part 2), 128,
(Part 3), 161,164, (Part 4), 25; XH and XHI:
Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 70-71, (Part 3), 301; XIV
and XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 136-37, 294,
(Part 2), 103.

596

Notes to pages 328-40

78. Ibid, , H: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 5-

6 .

79. J6id, IE: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 51.
For recollections of "hard times,” especially
in the first winter of freedom, see also VI:
Ala. Narr., 226; VII: Okla. Narr., 294; VHI
and X: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 6, 161, (Part 5),
124; XIV and XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 186,
(Part 2), 268.

80. Ibid., XVI: Term. Narr., 6; VH:
Okla. Narr., 202.

81. Ibid., VD: Miss. Narr., 39-41.

82. Ibid., XII and XIH: Ga. Narr. (Part
3), 29, (Part 2), 8; VTt: Miss. Narr., 41.

83. Ibid., VI: Ala. Narr., 405-06; IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 1), 82-83; VII: Okla. Narr.,
51.

84. Williamson, After Slavery, 36-37;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for End
of May 1865, Univ. of South Carolina; Ha¬
wick (ed.), American Slave, VI: Ala. Narr.,
167.

85. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 335-38.

86. Mrs. William Mason Smith to Mrs.
Edward L. Cottenet, July 12, 1865, in D. E.

H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters,

221 .

87. Isabella A. Soustan to "Master
Man” [probably George C. Taylor], July 10,
1865, George C. Taylor Collection, Univ. of
North Carolina.

88. Alice Dabney to "My Dear Old
Master” [Thomas Dabney], Feb. 10,1867, in
Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter,
234-35. Susan Dabney Smedes, the daugh¬
ter of Thomas Dabney, added that the letter
had been written "with Alice’s own hand.”

89. Jake to "Mas William” [William
D. Simpson], Feb. 5, 1867, Simpson Papers,
Univ. of North Carolina.

90. Cincinnati Commercial, reprinted
in New York Tribune, Aug. 22, 1865, as a
"letter dictated by a servant.” For other re¬
prints of the letter, see "Letter from a Freed¬
man to His Old Master: Written just as he
dictated it,” in Lydia Maria Child (ed.), The
Freedmen’sBook (Boston, 1865), 265-67, and
Carter G. Woodson (ed.), The Mind of the
Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During
the Crisis 1800-1860 (Washington, D.C.,
1926), 537-39.

Chapter Seven: Back to Work: The Old Compulsions

1. South Carolina Leader, Dec. 16,

1865.

2. W. L. DeRosset to Louis Henry
DeRosset, June 20, 1866, DeRosset Family
Papers, Univ. of North Carolina.

3. Dr. Ethelred Philips to Dr. James J.
Philips, Aug. 2, 1865, James J. Philips Col¬
lection, Univ. of North Carolina; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 390-91.

4. Ravenel, Private Journal, 269; Wil¬
liam Henry Stiles to Elizabeth Anne
Mackay, Sept. 22, 1865, Mackay-Stiles Col¬
lection, Univ. of North Carolina; Kolchin,
First Freedom, 23.

5. Donald MacRae to Julia MacRae,
Sept. 4, 1865, MacRae Papers, Duke Univ.;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 83-84

6. Ibid., 26.

7. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 4), 50; IX: Ark. Narr. (Part
3), 156; Abraham to "My Dear Master” [Jo¬
seph Glover], May 15, 1865, and John W.
Burbidge to Joseph Glover, June 26, 1865,

Glover-North Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; Knox, Camp-fire and Cotton Field,
374.

8. Rev. John Hamilton Cornish, Ms.
Diary, entry for June 19, 1865, Univ. of
North Carolina. See also Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, XI: Mo. Narr., 272-73.

9. Knox, Camp-fire and Cotton Field,
337; New York Times, Feb. 12, 1865; Bell I.
Wiley, "Vicissitudes of Early Reconstruc¬
tion Farming in the Lower Mississippi Val¬
ley,” Journal of Southern History, HI (1937),
451-52.

10. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 5, 6, 9,11, 22,106,109-
10; Trowbridge, The South, 391, 392; Myers
(ed.), Children of Pride, 1309; New York
Times, April 12, 1867; Kolchin, First Free¬
dom, 9; Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice
Plantation, 330. Most of the volume by Lor¬
ing and Atkinson consists of responses by
cotton planters to a circular asking for "de¬
tailed facts and opinions relative to the la-

Notes to pages 340-50

597

bor, the methods of cotton culture, and the
general condition and capacities of the
South.”

11. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 10.

12. Ibid., 8; Edward Barnwell Hey¬
ward to "Tat” [Catherine Maria Clinch
Heyward], May 5, 1867, Heyward Family
Papers, Univ. of South Carolina; William E.
Bayley to Commanding Officer, July 3,1865,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau.

13. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 4,110. See also William
Henry Stiles to Elizabeth Anne Mackay,
Sept. 22,1865, Mackay-Stiles Collection, and
Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Diary, entry for July
24, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina; George
Parliss to Lt. Stuart Eldridge, April 9,1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau; Wilmer Shields to William Newton
Mercer, July 10,1866, Mercer Papers, Loui¬
siana State Univ.

14. Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia
Plantation, 24-26, 57.

15. Wiley, "Vicissitudes of Early Re¬
construction Farming in the Lower Missis¬
sippi Valley,” 449-50; Avary, Dixie after the
War, 189-90. See also Wilmer Shields to
William Newton Mercer, Sept. 20, 1865,
Mercer Papers, Louisiana State Univ.

16. Reid, After the War, 460-64.

17. Jordan, Hugh Davis and His Ala¬
bama Plantation, 151-62. Similar frustra¬
tions are described in Elias Horry Deas to
Anne Deas, Oct. 20, 1866, Deas Papers,
Univ. of South Carolina.

18. Andrews, The South since the War,
22; Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor
Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves (eds.), The
Letters of William Gilmore Simms (5 vols.;
Columbia, S.C., 1952-56), IV, 557, 567, 602;
W. W. Bateman to John L. Manning, Aug. 2,
1865, Williams-Chesnut-Manning Papers,
Univ. of South Carolina; Grace B. Elmore,
Ms. Diary, entry for March 4,1865, Univ. of
North Carolina; John Moore to Mrs. Joseph
R. Snyder, Oct. 11,1866, Kean-Prescott Pa¬
pers, Univ. of North Carolina; Trowbridge,
The South, 118-19; Dennett, The South As
It Is, 42, 78, 191; Reid, After the War, 164-

65, 186, 298, 318; 39 Cong,, 1 Sess., Senate
Exec. Doc. 2, "Report of Carl Schurz on the
States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, and Louisiana,” in Message of
the President of the United States, 16-17,27;
National Freedman, I (Aug. 15, 1865), 224;
De Forest, Union Officer in the Reconstruc¬
tion, 100-01.

19. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 4, 6, 13.

20. New York Times, Dec 31, 1861;
Christian Recorder, June 17,1865; Macrae,
Americans at Home, 324.

21. Dennett, The South As It Is, 191;
Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation,
55.

22. Waterbury, Seven Years Among
the Freedmen, 71.

23. Charles Stearns, The Black Man of
the South, and the Rebels (New York, 1872),
43-46.

24. Williamson, After Slavery, 51;
Eppes, Negro of the Old South, 115-17;
Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years, 282-
83.

25. William Henry Stiles to Elizabeth
Anne Mackay, Sept. 22,1865, Mackay-Stiles
Collection, Univ. of North Carolina; Leigh,
Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, 52;
Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for July
17, 1865, Univ. of South Carolina.

26. Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice
Plantation, 212, 215; D. E. H. Smith (ed.),
Mason Smith Family Letters, 248; Myers
(ed.), Children of Pride, 1280,1287,1308-09.

27. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
1280; Williamson, After Slavery, 40; Leigh,
Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, 38;
Jones (ed.), Heroines of Dixie, 268-69.

28. S. D. G. Niles to Maj. Gen. T. J.
Wood, June 13, 1866, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, VI: Ala. Narr., 176-77; VH:
Miss. Narr., 54.

29. Ella Gertrude (Clanton) Thomas,
Ms. Journal, entries for May 27, 29, 1865,
Duke Univ.

30. Dr. Ethelred Philips to Dr. James
J. Philips, Oct. 24, 1865, James J. Philips
Collection, Univ. of North Carolina; Le-
Grand, Journal, 263-64; D. E. H. Smith (ed.).
Mason Smith Family Letters, 223; Emma E.

598

Notes to pages 351-60

Holmes, Ms. Diary, entries for Aug. 22, Oct.

I, 1865, IJniv. of South Carolina; James C.
Bonner, "Plantation Experiences of a New
York Woman,” North Carolina Historical
Review, XXIII (1956), 546.

31. Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, en¬
tries for March 4, May 24,30,1865, Univ. of
North Carolina.

32. Donald MacRae to Julia MacRae,
Sept. 4, 1865, MacRae Papers, Duke Univ.

33. Dr. Ethelred Philips to Dr. James

J. Philips, June 17, 1867, James J. Philips
Collection, Univ. of North Carolina. See also
Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years , 311.

34. William Heyward to James Grego-
rie, June 4,1868, Gregorie-Elliott Collection,
Univ. of North Carolina; Loring and Atkin¬
son, Cotton Culture and the South, 5 (see
also 11, 85, 87, 93).

35. Richardson, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Florida, 54; New York Times,
Oct. 8,1865; 39 Cong., 2 Sess., Senate Exec.
Doc. 6, Reports of the Assistant Commission¬
ers of Freedmen [Jan. 3, 1867], 159; Loring
and Atkinson, Cotton Culture and the South,
84,87,94; Claude H. Nolen, The Negro's Im¬
age in the South: The Anatomy of White Su¬
premacy (Lexington, Ky., 1967), 173-77;
Reid, After the War, 397.

36. C. W. Clarke to Col. Samuel
Thomas, June 29,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Theodore B.
Wilson, The Black Codes of the South (Uni¬
versity, Ala., 1965), 45; 39 Cong., 2 Sess., Sen¬
ate Exec. Doc. 6, Reports of the Assistant
Commissioners of Freedmen [Jan. 3, 1867],
159; Taylor, Negro in the Reconstruction of
Virginia, 109; Williamson, After Slavery,
117.

37. Moore (ed.). The Juhl Letters (Aug.
7,1866), 108; Reid, After the War, 276; Tay¬
lor, Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia,
122; Edward Barnwell Heyward to Allen C.
Izard, July 16, 1866, Heyward Family Pa¬
pers, Univ. of South Carolina.

38. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 71; Taylor, Negro in the
Reconstruction of Virginia, 74-75; 39 Cong.,
1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction, Part II, 109.

39. Richardson, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Florida, 53.

40. Mrs. McKenzie Parker to Mrs.

William Mason Smith, Nov. 6,1865, in D. E.
H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters,
246; Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry for
July 13, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina. See
also Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years,
309-40.

41. Bryant (ed.), "A Yankee Soldier
Looks at the Negro,” 145; Sarah M. Payne to
Mary M. Clendenin, Sept. 30,1865, Histori¬
cal Society of Pennsylvania; Ella Gertrude
(Clanton) Thomas, Ms. Journal, entries for
May [26], 29,1865, Duke Univ.

42. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry
for May 3, 1865, Univ. of South Carolina;
Avary, Dixie after the War, 188-89; Myers
(ed.), Children of Pride, 1280.

43. Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries,
36; Simkins and Patton, Women of the
Confederacy, 255; William Heyward to
James Gregorie, June 4,1868, Gregorie-Elli¬
ott Collection, Univ. of North Carolina. See
also LeConte, When the World Ended, 54.

44. Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 373-74, 375.

45. Ibid., 374-75.

46. LeGrand, Journal, 99-100; An¬
drews, War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl,
375-76, 378-80.

47. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, en¬
tries for End of May, June 15, Aug. 14, 25,
1865, Univ. of South Carolina.

48. Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 374; Chesnut, Diary from
Dixie, 488; Stone, Brokenbum, 7-9. For the
daily tasks of a housemaid under slavery, as
recalled by an ex-slave who had assisted her
mother, see Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VI: Ala. Narr., 416-17.

49. Eppes, Through Some Eventful
Years, 310; Eppes, Negro of the Old South,
137, 139-40.

50. Trowbridge, The South, 328-29.

51. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 22; Waterbury, Seven
Years Among the Freedmen, 40.

52. D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith
Family Letters, 222; Hope L. Jones to "My
Dear Aunt,” Feb. 28, 1866, Bruce-Jones-
Murchison Papers, Univ. of South Carolina.

53. Trowbridge, The South, 291.

54. Dennett, The South As It Is, 15;
Williamson, After Slavery, 73. See also
Moore (ed.), The Juhl Letters (Aug. 31,
1865), 34.

Notes to pages 360-67

599

55. Charles L. Wagandt, The Mighty
Revolution: Negro Emancipation in Mary¬
land, 1862-1864 (Baltimore, 1964), 42; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, Part IV, 16.

56. Andrews, The South since the War,
364; Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction
in Alabama, 386; Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1338. See also Moore (ed.), The Juki
Letters (Dec. 31,1865), 59.

57. Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 340; Trowbridge, The South,
491.

58. Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 54;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 6 , 15, 102-03;
Reid, After the War, 337; Trowbridge, The
South, 78-79; Macrae, Americans at Home,
132, 294-95; Haviland, A Woman's Life-
Work, 306; Loring and Atkinson, Cotton
Culture and the South, 6—7,11; Myers (ed.),
Children of Pride, 1244; Moore (ed.), The
Juki Letters (Jan. 26,1866), 71; Selma Mir¬
ror, as quoted in New Orleans Tribune, Dec.
19,' 1865; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
109.

59. Dennett, The South As It Is, 290;
Grace B. Elmore, Ms. Diary, entry for March
4,1865, Univ. of North Carolina. For similar
predictions, see, e.g., Loring and Atkinson,
Cotton Culture and the South, 6-7,20; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 78; Macrae, Americans at
Home, 295; Duncan McLaurin to Gov. E.
Hawley, May 23, 1866, McLaurin Papers,
Duke Univ.; Roark, Masters Without Slaves,
!38.

60. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 9; Hepworth, Whip, Hoe,
and Sword, 49-50; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report
of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction,
Part II, 130; Dennett, The South As It Is, 15;
Reid, After the War, 164-65. Planters would
use this argument repeatedly to explain vio¬
lations of labor contracts by blacks and the
folly of monthly wage payments in cash.

61. Andrews, The South since the War,

364.

62. Macrae, Americans at Home, 321;
39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Com¬
mittee on Reconstruction, Part III, 136;
Moore (ed.), The Juhl Letters (July 22,1865),
20; Dennett, The South As It Is, 15. On Dec.
2,1866, the New Orleans Tribune reprinted
this lament from the Brandon (Miss.) Re¬

publican: "Alas! he [the freedman] cannot
sing and dance with the same zest now. He
has no old master to furnish him food and
raiment; no kind mistress to take care of
him when he gets sick; no comfortable cabin
to live in; no thick clothing to shield him
from the storms; no banjo to pick, and his
heart is so heavy he can’t sing and dance.
Candidly, we have not seen or heard of a real
old fashioned negro frolic since the poor dar¬
key was set free.”

63. Trowbridge, The South, 136, 332.

64. Reid, After the War, 218.

65. Dennett, The South As It Is, 65.

66 . Col. Samuel Thomas, Asst. Com¬
missioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen,
and Abandoned Lands for Mississippi and
N.E. Louisiana, to Gen. Carl Schurz, Sept.
28, 1865, in 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec.
Doc. 2, "Report of Carl Schurz on the States
of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mis¬
sissippi, and Louisiana,” in Message of the
President of the United States, 81.

67. Andrews, The South since the War,
398.

68 . Reid, After the War, 25, 44, 291,
337; Andrews, The South since the War, 398;
39 Cong, 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 2, "Re¬
port of Carl Schurz,” 16-17; Wharton, Negro
in Mississippi, 83; New York Times, Sept.
17,1865.

69. Macon Telegraph, May 16, 1865,
quoted in New York Times, June 16, 1865;
Trowbridge, The South, 573; Reid, After the
War, 343-44.

70. Ravenel, Private Journal, 256;
Walter L. Fleming (ed.), Documentary His¬
tory of Reconstruction (2 vols.; Cleveland,
1906-07), 1,282-83; Wharton, Negro in Mis¬
sissippi, 84-85, 91-92; Wilson, Black Codes
of the South, 74.

71. Andrews, The South since the War,
157-58; Dennett, The South As It Is, 161-62;
Reid, After the War, 361.

72. New York Times, June 17, 1865;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 133; Wharton,
Negro in Mississippi, 84; Otto H. Olsen, Car¬
petbaggers Crusade: The Life of Albion
Winegar Tourgee (Baltimore, 1965), 34.

73 . New Orleans Daily South, Nov. 19,
1865, quoted in Reid, After the War, 411;
Edgefield (S.C.) Advertiser, Oct. 25, 1865,
quoted in Wilson, Black Codes of the South,

600

Notes to pages 367-75

145; Fleming (ed.), Documentary History of
Reconstruction, I, 298-99.

74. The discussion of the Black Codes
is based on the enactments compiled in
“Laws in Relation to Freedmen,” 39 Cong.,
2 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 6, Freedmen’s
Affairs, 170-230; Edward McPherson, The
Political History of the United States of
America During the Period of Reconstruc¬
tion (Washington, D.C., 1880), 29-44; and
Fleming (ed.), Documentary History of Re¬
construction, I, 273-312. See also Wharton,
Negro in Mississippi, 83-89; Williamson, Af¬
ter Slavery, 72-76; Stampp, Era of Recon¬
struction, 79-80; and Wilson, Black Codes of
the South, 65-80, 96-116. In examining the
state legislation regarding the freedmen,
care must be taken not to confuse laws
proposed with those actually enacted; the
northern press was not always clear on this
point.

75. New Orleans Tribune, July 15,19,
30, Aug. 20,1865. For the Louisiana parish
laws, see also 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec.
Doc. 2, “Report of Carl Schurz,” 92-96.

76. Trowbridge, The South, 373; Wil¬
son, Black Codes of the South, 143; Whar¬
ton, Negro in Mississippi, 83.

77. Colored People to the Governor of
Mississippi, Petition of the Freedmen of
Claiborne County, Miss., Dec. 3, 1865, in
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau.

78. South Carolina Leader, Dec. 16,
1865; Loyal Georgian, Feb 17, 1866. For
black protest, see also Colored American,
Jan. 6, 13, 1866; Loyal Georgian, Feb. 3,
1866; South Carolina Leader, Dec. 23,1865.

79. McPherson, Political History of
the United States of America During the Pe¬
riod of Reconstruction, 36-38, 41-42; Wil¬
liamson, After Slavery, 77-79; Fleming,
Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama,
378-79, 382-83; Wharton, Negro in Missis¬
sippi, 90-93; Taylor, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Virginia, 18; Richardson, Negro
in the Reconstruction of Florida, 43; Wilson,
Black Codes of the South, 96-115.

80. Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 91,
92; New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 20, 1865.

81. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 235;
Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 146; An¬
drews, The South since the War, 25. For sim¬

ilar sentiments, see also Jordan, Hugh Davis
and His Alabama Plantation, 161; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 390-91, 393; 39 Cong., 1
Sess., Report of the Joint Committee on Re¬
construction, Part IE, 5, 24-25.

82. Dennett, The South As It Is, 53.
See also ibid., 77-82; Trowbridge, The
South, 389; C. W. Clarke to Col. Samuel
Thomas, June 29,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau.

83. Dennett, The South As It Is, 129,
261, 252.

84. Andrews, The South since the War,
205, 362.

85. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV
and V: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 280, (Part 3),
83-84. See also XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1),
72.

86. Ibid., VEIL Ark. Narr. (Part 2),
284; Trowbridge, The South, 291-92.

87. Andrews, The South since the War,
26; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Com¬
mittee on Reconstruction, Part III, 3; Stone,
Brokenburn, 368-69.

88. Trowbridge, The South, 427-28;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XVIII: Un¬
written History, 138. See also V: Texas
Narr. (Part 3), 261.

89. Williamson, After Slavery, 88;
John W. Burbidge to Joseph Glover, July 28,
1865, Glover-North Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; Rev. John Jones to Mrs. Jones,
July 26, 1865, in Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1282-83. See also Dr. Ethelred Phil¬
ips to Dr. James J. Philips, Aug. 2, 1865,
James J. Philips Collection, Univ. of North
Carolina; H. A. Johnson to “Dear Friend
Samuel,” July 14, 1865, Univ. of North
Carolina; Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, en¬
try for June 15, 1865, Univ. of South
Carolina; Easterby (ed.), South Carolina
Rice Plantation, 210-211; Oliphant et al.
(eds.), Letters of William Gilmore Simms,
IV, 505; LeConte, When the World Ended,
105, 115-16.

90. For the Union Army and the ex¬
pulsion of freed slaves from the cities and
towns, see above, Chapter 6. For the military
role in imposing order on the plantations,
se*, e.g., Petition of 18 Planters, Pineville,
Charleston District, Sept. 1,1865, Trenholm
Papers, Univ, of North Carolina; Ravenel,
Private Journal, 223; Richardson, Negro in

Notes to pages 375-81

601

the Reconstruction of Florida, 56; New York
Times, June 16, 1865.

91. Col. William E. Bayley to Com¬
manding Officer, Vicksburg, Miss., July 3,
1865, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, Mississippi (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau; New Orleans Tribune, April
11,1865.

92. Eppes, Negro of the Old South,
125; Ball, The State That Forgot, 128; Reid,
After the War, 419. See also Myers (ed.),
Children of Pride, 1292-93.

93. Towne, Letters and Diary, 20;
Knox, Camp-fire and Cotton Field, 316-17.

94. On wartime Federal labor policies
in the South, see Gerteis, From Contraband
to Freedman; Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the
Freedmen; and Wiley, Southern Negroes,
esp. 230-59. On white and black lessees, see
Christian Recorder, July 16, 1864; New Or¬
leans Tribune, July 11, 1865; Report of the
General Superintendent of Freedmen, De¬
partment of the Tennessee and State of Ar¬
kansas for 1864 (Memphis, 1865), 14-15, 50;
Knox, Camp-fire and Cotton Field, 320-21;
National Freedman, I (Feb. 1, May 1, July
15,1865), 16-17,121,187; New York Times,
Nov. 13,28,1863, Aug. 2, Sept. 26,1865; and
the experience of Isaac Shoemaker in Roark,
Masters Without Slaves, 118-19. On the Da¬
vis Bend project, see Col. Samuel Thomas,
"Report of a Trip to Davis Bend, Waterproof
and Natchez,” in Warren, Extracts from Re¬
ports of Superintendents of Freedmen; Reid,
After the War, 279-87; Trowbridge, The
South, 383-84; Knox, Camp-fire and Cotton
Field, 353; National Freedman, I (Feb. 1,
1865), 25; New Orleans Tribune, July 9, 29,
1865; New York Times, Oct. 2,1864, Aug. 22,
1865; Joseph E. Davis and Benjamin F.
Montgomery, Article of Agreement, Oct. 31,
1865, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, Mississippi (Letters Received), Freed-
men’s Bureau; Semi-Weekly Louisianian,
May 14,1871; New National Era, April 20,
1871; and Wharton, Negro in Mississippi,
38-42. After the war, Davis leased two plan¬
tations to Benjamin T. Montgomery, his for¬
mer slave and plantation manager, who
subsequently purchased the plantations and
became a successful planter.

95. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry
for June 15, 1865, Univ. of South Carolina.

96. Knox, Camp-fire and Cotton Field,

364-69; Black Republican, April 15, 1865;
New York Times, Dec. 22, 1862, Jan. 16,
March 5, April 17,1863, Sept. 25,1864; Sit-
terson, Sugar Country, 220-23; Gerteis,
From Contraband to Freedman, 65-82; Wi¬
ley, Southern Negroes, 210-21; Messner,
"Black Violence and White Response: Loui¬
siana, 1862,” 31-37.

97. New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 13,
Dec. 8, 1864, Jan. 28, Feb. 7, 18, March 14,
19, April 1, 9, July 29, 1865. See also ibid.,
Oct. 16,1864, March 16, April 13,1865. For
a meeting to protest the labor system and
the reaction of Federal authorities, see ibid.,
March 18, 19, 28, 29, 30, 1865.

98. New Orleans Tribune, Oct. 12,
1864; Gerteis, From Contraband to Freed¬
man, 90,113-14.

99. Messner, "Black Violence and
White Response: Louisiana, 1862,” 36-37.

100. Ruffin, Diary, 33, 601-03, 670-72.

101. Thomas Smith to Capt. J. H. We¬
ber, Nov. 3, 1865, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau.

102. Free Man's Press, Sept. 12, 1868;
39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freed¬
men’s Bureau, 263-64.

103. Lt. George Parliss to Lt. Stuart
Eldridge, April 9,1866; Capt. A. Preston to
Eldridge, June 7,1866; R. H. Willoughby to
Bvt. Maj. A. M. Crawford, July 27, 1867;
Capt. William A. Poillon to Brig. Gen.
Wager Swayne, Nov. 1865; Capt. J. H. We¬
ber to Col. Samuel Thomas, July 1, 1865,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Parliss, Preston, Weber), South
Carolina (Willoughby), Alabama (Poillon)
(Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freed¬
men’s Bureau, 2-3. For advice to freedmen,
see also ibid., 2-3, 34-35, 92-93, 124-25,
231-32, 263-64, 309, 395, and 39 Cong., 1
Sess., Report of the Joint Committee on Re¬
construction, Part II, 230-31; Colored Ten¬
nessean , Oct. 14, 1865; and Dennett, The
South As It Is, 250.

104. S. D. G. Niles to Maj. Gen. T. J.
Wood, June 13, 1866, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Dennett, The
South As It Is, 251-52. For native white
praise of the Bureau, see also David Hum¬
phreys to Bvt. Maj. Gen. Swayne, Nov. 25,

602

Notes to pages 381-85

1865, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, Alabama (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau; Moore (ed.), The Juki Letters
(Sept. 4,1865), 37-38; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Sen¬
ate Exec. Doc. 27, Reports of the Assistant
Commissioners of the Freedmen’s Bureau
[1865-1866], 81; Dennett, The South As It Is,
291-92; New York Times, Sept. 13, 1865;
Taylor, Negro in Tennessee, 14-15; and
Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 78. For hos¬
tile white views, see Leigh, Ten Years on a
Georgia Plantation, 33-34; Reid, After the
War, 577-78; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
113,123; Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 78.

105. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
230; House Exec. Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau, 231; Fisk, Plain Counsels for Freed-
men, 12. See also O. O. Howard in National
Freedman, I (Aug. 15, 1865), 234-35, and
Col. J. L. Haynes to Capt. B. F. Henry, July
8, 1865, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

106. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec.
Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bureau, 219-20. See
also Capt. William A. Poillon to Brig. Gen.
Wager Swayne, Nov, 1865, and Lt. George
Parliss to Lt. Stuart Eldridge, April 9,1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners, Al¬
abama and Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

107. Williamson, After Slavery, 87,91;
Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction of
Florida, 57-58, 62; Wharton, Negro in Mis¬
sissippi, 74-77; Horace James to the Sec¬
retaries of the American Missionary
Association, Oct. 20, 1865, American Mis¬
sionary Assn. Archives. For the work of the
Bureau, see also Autobiography of Oliver
Otis Howard (2 vols.; New York, 1907); "Of
the Dawn of Freedom,” in W. E. B. Du Bois,
The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903), 13-
40; Bentley, A History of the Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau; McFeely, Yankee Stepfather; Abbott,
The Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina;
Howard A. White, The Freedmen’s Bureau
in Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1970).

108. Andrews, The South since the
War, 23-24; Christian Recorder, Dec. 1,

1866. For critical observations of Bureau
personnel and their treatment of the freed-

men, see letters and affidavits from Bacchus
Brinson (colored), Augusta, Ga., March 21,
1866, Berry Chalman (freedman), Augusta,
Ga., May 24,1866, William Davis and others
(freedmen), March 31, 1866, Margaret J.
McMurry (white), Marietta, Ga., Oct. 25,
1866, and M. V. Jordan, Miller Co., Ga., Oct.
27,1866, in Freedmen’s Bureau (Registers of
Letters Received), Georgia. See also black
testimony on the Bureau in Christian
Recorder, Aug. 12, 1865, May 26, June 9,
1866, and Trowbridge, The South, 465.

109. On black Bureau agents, see, e.g.,
the letters and reports of Martin R. Delany
and B. F. Randolph, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), and of J. J. Wright, Records of the
Subdivision of Beaufort, South Carolina,
Freedmen’s Bureau.

110. New Orleans Tribune, Dec. 14,23,

1865.

111. De Forest, Union Officer in the
Reconstruction, 39,41-42. See also Dennett,
The South As It Is, 109-10, 221.

112. New Orleans Tribune, Oct. 31,
1867; De Forest, Union Officer in the Recon¬
struction, 29-30. For typical cases handled
by a Bureau agent, see, e.g., Reports of J. J.
Wright, Records of the Subdivision of Beau¬
fort, South Carolina, and the Tri-Monthly
Reports of James DeGrey, as submitted to
William H. Webster, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Louisiana (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Dennett, The
South As It Is, 125-26; and De Forest, Union
Officer in the Reconstruction, 28-36.

113. Dennett, The South As It Is, 73-
74. See also the testimony of Lorenzo Ivy in
Armstrong and Ludlow, Hampton and Its
Students, 80.

114. Christian Recorder, June 23,
1866; Affidavit of Bacchus Brinson, Augusta,
Ga., March 21, 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau
(Registers of Letters Received), Georgia;
Amos McCollough to Gen. O. O. Howard,
May 6,1866, Records of the Assistant Com¬
missioners, North Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau.

115. 39 Cong., 2 Sess., Senate Exec.
Doc. 6, Reports of the Assistant Commission¬
ers of Freedmen [Jan. 3, 1867], 113, 116;
Capt. Randolph Stoops to Capt. George L.
Childs, July 15, 1865, and Statement of

Notes to pages 386-96

603

Frederick Nicholas and Miner Poindexter of
Columbia, Fluvanna Co., Virginia, June 28,
1865, Brock Collection, Henry E. Hunting-
ton Library.

116. Lt. George Parliss to Lt. Stuart
Eldridge, April 9,1866, Capt. J. H. Weber to
Col. Samuel Thomas, July 1, 1865, Maj.
George D. Reynolds to Lt. Stuart Eldridge,
Oct. 5, 1865, Records of the Assistant Com¬

missioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

117. New Orleans Tribune , Oct. 31,
1867; Lt. C. W. Clarke to Col. Samuel
Thomas, June 29,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau.

118. New Orleans Tribune , Aug. 31,
Oct. 22, 1865.

Chapter Eight: Back to Work: The New Dependency

1. Henry Lee Swint, The Northern
Teacher in the South , 1862-1870 (Nashville,
1941), 89.

2. Christian Recorder, Sept. 30, 1865.

3. Nordhoff, Freedmen of South
Carolina, 7-8.

4. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 237; Towne, Letters and Di¬
ary, 31; New Orleans Tribune, Oct. 11, Nov.
21, 1865.

5. Lt. Edward M. Stoeber to Bvt. Maj.
Taylor, July 24,1865; "Memorandum of Ex¬
tracts from Speech by Major Delany, Afri¬
can, at the Brick Church, St. Helena Island,
South Carolina, Sunday, July 23,1865,” sub¬
mitted by Lt. Alexander Whyte, Jr., to Col.
Charles H. Howard, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau. For the
speech’s repercussions, see also W. E. Towne
to Bvt. Maj. Gen. Saxton, Aug. 17, 1865, in
the same records.

6. Loyal Georgian, Jan. 20, 1866.

7. New York Times, April 30,1865; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 53, Prelimi¬
nary Report...by the American Freedmen '$
Inquiry Commission, June 30,1863, 6-7. For
favorable views of black labor, see also, e.g.,
W. E. Towne to Bvt. Maj. Gen. Saxton, Aug.
17, 1865, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, South Carolina (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; A. C. Voris to Maj.
George A. Hicks, Oct. 21,1865, Brock Collec¬
tion, Henry E. Huntington Library; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, Part 1,117-18, Part II, 5,
13, 42, 43, 182, 247; Loring and Atkinson,
Cotton Culture and the South, 8-9,10; Reid,
After the War, 569-70; Trowbridge, The
South, 138, 162, 581; Colored Tennessean,
March 24, 1866; Christian Recorder, Aug.

19, Sept. 30,1865; New York Times, April 8,
Oct. 1, Nov. 12, 1865.

8. Trowbridge, The South, 150. See
also ibid., 288; Reid, After the War, 385; and
New York Times, Oct. 6, 1866.

9. Reid, After the War, 385; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 230n.-31n.; Swint (ed.),
Dear Ones at Home, 233.

10. New Orleans Tribune, July 16,

1865.

11. Williamson, After Slavery, 102.

12. Scarborough, The Overseer, 153;
New York Times, June 21, 1863. See also
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VIII: Ark.
Narr. (Part 1), 71.

13. New York Times, March 19,1864.
For wartime articulation of demands by
black laborers, see also Towne, Letters and
Diary, 24; New York Times, Oct. 14, 1862,
June 21,1863; Annette Koch to Christian D.
Koch, June 27, 1863, Koch Papers, Louisi¬
ana State Univ.; Sitterson, Sugar Country,
209; Scarborough, The Overseer, 155; Le-
Conte, ’ Ware Sherman, 56; Ravenel, Private
Journal, 215, 216; Knox, Camp-fire and Cot¬
ton Field, 374.

14. Hepworth, Whip, Hoe, and Sword,
29-30. For a similar incident, resulting in
the dismissal of the overseer, see New York
Times, Oct. 17, 1863.

15. Towne, Letters and Diary, 24;
Pearson (ed.), Letters from Port Royal, 250,
300-01, 303-04.

16. Patrick, Fall of Richmond, 118-
19; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XI: Mo.
Narr., 115; VH: Okla. Narr., 184-85.

17. Jones, Heroines of Dixie, 119-20;
Jervey and Ravenel, Two Diaries, 13.

18. Ravenel, Private Journal, 212,
214-18; Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1284.

19. Trowbridge, The South, 428.

604

Notes to pages 397-402

20. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
109; Jonathan Worth to Col. Whittlesey,
Nov. 23,1865, in J. G. De Roulhac Hamilton
(ed.), The Correspondence of Jonathan Worth
(2 vols.; Raleigh, 1909), I, 451; Letters from
Joseph Simpson (May 16,1865), 12. See also
Margaret L. Montgomery, "Alabama Freed-
men: Some Reconstruction Documents,”
Phylon, XIII (1952), 245; Trowbridge, The
South, 495; National Freedman, I (Aug. 15,
1865), 226.

21. Dr. Ethelred Philips to Dr. James
J. Philips, Aug. 2, 1865, James J. Philips
Collection, Univ. of North Carolina; Myers
(ed.), Children of Pride, 1241, 1371, 1405,
1412.

22. For examples of these concerns,
see 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint
Committee on Reconstruction, Part II, 54,
56; Loyal Georgian, Jan. 27, 1866; Wiley,
Southern Negroes, 231-33; Rose, Rehearsal
for Reconstruction, 79, 82; Dennett, The
South As It Is, 254-55.

23. New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 30,

1864, Jan. 28,29, Feb. 2, March 1,8, July 16,

1865. See also Richard H. Cain in Christian
Recorder, June 17, 1865.

24. Christian Recorder, March 25,
1865; Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails, 68-69.

25. Patrick, Fall of Richmond, 125.

26. McPherson, Negro's Civil War,
294; Maj. George D. Reynolds to Lt. Stuart
Eldridge, Oct. 5,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau. For additional
evidence of freedmen’s land expectations,
see Capt. William A. Poillon to Brig. Gen.
Wager Swayne, Nov. 1865, Records of the
Assistant Commissioners, Alabama (Letters
Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Bvt. Brig.
Gen. Alvin C. Voris to Maj. George A. Hicks,
Oct. 7, 1865, Brock Collection, Henry E.
Huntington Library; 39 Cong., 2 Sess., Sen¬
ate Exec. Doc. 6, Reports of the Assistant
Commissioners ofFreedmen [Jan. 3,1867], 4;
39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freed¬
men’s Bureau, 394; J. S. Fullerton, Report of
the Administration of Freedmen’s Affairs in
Louisiana (Washington, D.C., 1865), 2; Den¬
nett, The South As It Is, 188-89.

27. Andrews, The South since the War,
97-98; Thomas Smith to Capt. J. H. Weber,
Nov. 3,1865, Records of the Assistant Com¬

missioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; Letters from Joseph
Simpson (May 29, 1865), 13; Manuel Gott¬
lieb, "The Land Question in Georgia During
Reconstruction,” Science and Society, III
(1939), 360.

28. D. E. H. Smith (ed.), Mason Smith
Family Letters, 234; Elias Horry Deas to
Anne Deas, Aug. 12, 1865, Deas Papers,
Univ. of South Carolina; Josiah Gorgas, Ms.
Journal, entry for Aug. 30, 1865, Univ. of
North Carolina; Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Di¬
ary, entry for Nov. 3, 1865, Univ. of North
Carolina; Petition of 18 Planters, Pineville,
Charleston District, Sept. 1,1865, Trenholm
Papers, Univ. of North Carolina; Donald
MacRae to Julia MacRae, Sept. 4,1865, Mac-
Rae Papers, Duke Univ.; Ravenel, Private
Journal, 258; Oliphant et al. (eds.), Letters of
William Gilmore Simms, IV, 528, 560;
Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation,
27-28; Gottlieb, "The Land Question in
Georgia During Reconstruction,” 359; Sa¬
vannah Writers’ Project, Savannah River
Plantations (Savannah, 1947), 324; Hey¬
ward, Seed from Madagascar, 150-51; East-
erby (ed.), South Carolina Rice Plantation,
207; Andrews, The South since the War,
232-33.

29. The text of the meeting with the
black ministers may be found in National
Freedman, I (April 1, 1865), 98-101, and in
New York Tribune, Feb. 13,1865. On Sher¬
man’s Order No. 15 and the land policy of
the Freedmen’s Bureau, see Williamson, Af¬
ter Slavery, 59-63; McFeely, Yankee Step¬
father, 104-05; and the testimony of Gen.
Rufus Saxton in 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of
the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part

n, 221.

30. Trowbridge, The South, 151; Ed¬
ward Barnwell Heyward to Catherine Maria
Clinch Heyward, May 5, 1867, Heyward
Family Papers, Univ. of South Carolina;
Reid, After the War, 564,59. For similar sen¬
timents, see Dennett, The South As It Is,
341-42, and 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part HI,
77.

31. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
191, Part in, 31; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 179,
(Part 3), 78; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 219;

Notes to pages 402-9

605

Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat,
291.

32. Bradford, Harriet Tubman , 102;
Eppes, Negro of the Old South, 133.

33. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI:
Ala- Narr., 314-15; Maj. George D. Reynolds
to Lt. Stuart Eldridge, Oct. 5, 1865, and
Capt. William A. Poillon to Brig. Gen.
Wager Swayne, Nov. 1865, Records of the
Assistant Commissioners, Mississippi and
Alabama (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc.
70, Freedmen’s Bureau, 4-5; WPA, Negro in
Virginia, 218. For instructions to Bureau
agents regarding the land expectations of
blacks, see also Freedmen’s Bureau, 34, 95,
135, 147, 162-63, 309, 367-68.

34. Black Republican, April 15,1865;
Christian Recorder, Aug. 26, 1865. See also
Colored Tennessean, Oct. 14, 1865.

35. W. E. Towne to Bvt. Maj. Gen. Sax¬
ton, Aug. 17,1865, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Armstrong,
Old Massa’s People, 334-35; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, IH: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 45;
Williamson, After Slavery, 166; Rose, Re¬
hearsal for Reconstruction, 200-01, 214—15;
Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction of
Florida, 73, 75-76, 79-81.

36. New York Times, May 12, 1867;
WPA, Negro in Virginia, 219-20; Fleming,
Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama,
447-48; Richardson, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Florida, 74-75.

37. 39 Cong., 2 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc.
6 , Reports of the Assistant Commissioners of
Freedmen [Jan. 3, 1867], 120; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave, VII: Miss. Narr., 97-98,
147; Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 60;
Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction of
Florida, 76; Dennett, The South As It Is,
73.

38. E. Merton Coulter, The South Dur¬
ing Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (Baton
Rouge, 1947), 109; Gottlieb, "The Land Ques¬
tion in Georgia During Reconstruction,”
364; New Orleans Tribune, April 19, May 6 ,
1865; McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 95, 203;
"Petition from Colored Citizens of Roanoke
Island,” enclosed in Bvt. Maj. Daniel Hart to
Commanding Officer, Post of Goldsboro,
N.C., Dec. 28,1867, Records of the Assistant

Commissioners, North Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau.

39. Dennett, The South As It Is, 248-
51; Gottlieb, "The Land Question in Georgia
During Reconstruction,” 364.

40. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 195-99; Armstrong and Lud¬
low, Hampton and Its Students, 181; Auto¬
biography of Oliver Otis Howard, II, 238-39;
Andrews, The South since the War, 212;
Ames, From a New England Woman’s Diary
in Dixie, 95-103.

41. Ames, From a New England Wom¬
an’s Diary in Dixie, 98, 99-103; McFeely,
Yankee Stepfather, 156-57.

42. New York Times, Oct. 10, 12, 13,
19,1867; New Era, July 7,1870; WPA, Negro
in Virginia, 218. For a similar confrontation
in Hampton, Virginia, see National Freed¬
man, I (Sept. 15, 1865), 267-68, and New
York Tribune, Aug. 25, 1865.

43. Avary, Dixie after the War, 345;
Lt. Erastus W. Everson to Bvt. Maj. Henry
W. Smith, Jan. 30,1866, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, South Carolina (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Rav-
enel, Private Journal, 271-72; New York
Times, Feb. 5,1866; Trowbridge, The South,
539-40. See also Williamson, After Slavery,
82-85.

44. Dennett, The South As It Is, 291;
William Heyward to James Gregorie, June
4,1868, Gregorie-Elliott Collection, Univ. of
North Carolina; Myers (ed.), Children of
Pride, 1308-09; Trowbridge, The South,
393. For agreements among planters not to
sell or rent lands to blacks, see Douglas G.
Manning to Mrs. John L. Manning, Dec. 25,
1865, Williams-Chesnut-Manning Papers,
Univ. of South Carolina; South Carolina
Leader, Dec. 16, 1865; 39 Cong., 1 Sess.,
House Exec. Doc, 70, Freedmen’s Bureau,
371; Andrews, The South since the War, 206;
New York Times, Jan. 27, 29, 1866; Taylor,
Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia,
106-07. See also Dennett, The South As It Is,
344 - 45 , and Reid, After the War, 564-65.

45. Allen S. Izard to Mrs. William Ma¬
son Smith, Sept. 15,1865, in D. E. H. Smith
(ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters, 231.

46. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc.
27, Reports of the Assistant Commissioners
of the Freedmen’s Bureau [1865-1866], 36-
37.

606

Notes to pages 409-12

47. Heyward, Seed from Madagascar,
140. See also the contracts cited in note 49.

48. Williamson, After Slavery, 97; H.
A. Moore, Jr., to Maj. Gen Scott, April 19,
1866, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, South Carolina (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

49. Contracts between Joseph Glover
and freedmen, Aug. 13,1865, to Jan. 1,1866,
and Jan. 1, 1866, to Jan. 1, 1867, Glover-
North Papers, Univ. of South Carolina; Con¬
tracts between Elias Horry Deas and
freedmen, Sept. 7,1865, and March 3,1866,
Deas Papers, Univ. of South Carolina; Felix
Shank to Capt. M. Whalen (Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau agent), July 14, 1868, including con¬
tract with freedman, Feb. 5, 1868, and
Contracts between A. J. and J. W. Shank
and Enos (freedman) and Augustus (freed¬
man), Jan. 5, 1867, Joseph Belknap Smith
Papers, Duke Univ.; “Form of Contracts be¬
tween planters and freedmen, as substan¬
tially adopted by the Darlington meeting,
revised and adopted by the mass meeting of
Sumter, Kershaw and Clarendon planters,
Dec. 21, 1865, and approved by Maj. Gen.
Saxton, of the Freedmen’s Bureau,” in 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, Part II, 241-42; “A
Freedmen’s Contract, 1865,” in Easterby
(ed.), South Carolina Rice Plantation, 354-
55; “Terms of Agreement between Charles
and E. B. Heyward, Esqrs., and certain la¬
bourers,” June 5, 1865, in Heyward, Seed
from Madagascar, 139-40; Dennett, The
South As It Is, 281-83; Lt. C. W. Clarke to
Col. Samuel Thomas, June 29,1865, Records
of the Assistant Commissioners, Mississippi
(Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Rog¬
ers, Thomas County, 1866-1900, 30-31;
Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 136; Loring
and Atkinson, Cotton Culture and the South,
28.

50. H. A. Moore, Jr., to Maj. Gen Scott,
April 19, 1866, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Rollin, Martin
R. Delany, 261-62.

51. Trowbridge, The South, 386. On
hours of labor, see contracts cited in note 49.

52. Trowbridge, The South, 367-68;
Lt. George Parliss to Lt. Stuart Eldridge,
April 9,1866, Records of the Assistant Com¬
missioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau.

53. Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia
Plantation, 33, 56; Trowbridge, The South,
430; Dennett, The South As It Is, 291;
Pierce, The Negroes at Port Royal, 9; Hey¬
ward, Seed from Madagascar, 157; “Visit to
'Gowrie’ and "East Hermitage’ Plantations,”
March 1867, Manigault Plantation Records,
Univ. of North Carolina. For contract provi¬
sions regarding the driver or black foreman,
see also Elias H. Deas contract with freed¬
men, March 3, 1866, Deas Papers, Univ. of
South Carolina, and 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report
of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction,
Part H, 241-42.

54. Trowbridge, The South, 391; Reid,
After the War, 490. The estimates of com¬
pensation rates are based on the archival
records and published reports of the Freed¬
men’s Bureau, the accounts of postwar trav¬
elers in the South (especially Sidney
Andrews, John R. Dennett, J. T. Trow¬
bridge, and Whitelaw Reid), and the black
press.

55. Dennett, The South As It Is, 321-
22; Reid, After the War, 526; Report of the
General Superintendent of Freedmen, De¬
partment of the Tennessee and State of Ar¬
kansas for 1864, 31. On compensation by
shares, see, e.g., the Glover and Deas con¬
tracts with freedmen cited in note 49; John
H. Bills, Ms. Diary, entry for Dec. 31,1866,
Univ. of North Carolina; Dr. Ethelred Phil¬
ips to Dr. James J. Philips, Jan. 21, 1866,
James J. Philips Collection, Univ. of North
Carolina; Myers (ed.). Children of Pride,
1363; Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice
Plantation, 210, 216; D. E. H. Smith (ed.),
Mason Smith Family Letters, 264; Heyward,
Seed from Madagascar, 139; and the ar¬
chival records and published reports of the
Freedmen’s Bureau. Although domestic ser¬
vants were often paid on a daily or weekly
basis, some contracts compensated them
with a share of the proceeds from sale of the
crop. See, e.g., Williamson, After Slavery,
159, and Wharton, Negro in Mississippi,
126-27.

56. Trowbridge, The South, 392; Reid,
After the War, 343; Dennett, The South As
It Is, 82; Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Plan¬
tation, 26; New York Times, Oct. 2, 1866;
Moore (ed.), The Juhl Letters (Aug. 11,
1866), 113. For the experience of a planter in
South Carolina who tried both systems, see
William M. Hazzard to Gen. R. K. Scott,

Notes to pages 413-18

607

March 11, 1868, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau.

57. J. W. Alvord, Report on Schools
and Finances of Freedmen, for January,
1866, 24; New National Era, April 13,1871;
De Forest, Union Officer in the Reconstruc¬
tion, 28; Trowbridge, The South, 424; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 27, Reports
of the Assistant Commissioners of the Freed-
men’s Bureau [1865-1866], 36-37. For the
pervasiveness of these fears and the grounds
on which they were based, see ibid, 21, 25;
John P. Bardwell to Rev. M. E. Strieby, Nov.
20, 1865, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; New York Times, Aug. 20, Oct. 14,
1865; Dennett, The South As It Is, 73; Leigh,
Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, 84.

58. Trowbridge, The South, 565.

59. Richardson, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Florida, 63; New Orleans Tri¬
bune, Dec. 8, 1864.

60. Reid, After the War, 291n.

61. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
Xni: Ga. Narr. (Part 4), 170-71.

62. Bvt. Brig. Gen. Alvin C. Voris to
Maj. George A. Hicks, Oct. 7, 1865, Brock
Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library;
Thomas Smith to Capt. J. H. Weber, Nov. 3,
1865, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, Mississippi (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec.
Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bureau, 252; Report of
the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part
II, 238. See also ibid., 247; H. A. Johnson to
"Dear Friend Samuel,” July 14,1865, Univ.
of North Carolina; and Williamson, After
Slavery, 38.

63. Williamson, After Slavery, 66; H.
W. Ravenel to Augustin L. Taveau, June 27,
1865, Taveau Papers, Duke Univ. On the
Freedmen’s Bureau and rations, see also
Botume, First Years Amongst the Contra¬
bands, 260; Rev. Horace James, Annual Re¬
port of the Superintendent of Negro Affairs
in North Carolina [1864-1865], Appendix,
57; "Report of the Commissioner of the Bu¬
reau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned
Lands, November 1,1866,” in Report of the
Secretary of War (Washington, D.C., 1867),
Appendix, 712; Avary, Dixie after the War,
211 - 12 .

64. New York Times, June 27, 1865;
Douglas G. Manning to Mrs. John L. Man¬
ning, Dec. 25, 1865, Williams-Chesnut-

Manning Papers, Univ. of South Carolina.
See also South Carolina Leader, Dec. 16,
1865; New Orleans Tribune, July 4,1865; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freed¬
men’s Bureau, 371; Trowbridge, The South,
229; Andrews, The South since the War, 206;
Taylor, Negro in the Reconstruction of Vir¬
ginia, 106.

65. Trowbridge, The South, 427.

66. Lorenzo James to Brig. Gen.
Wager Swayne, Nov. 20,1865, Records of the
Assistant Commissioners, Alabama (Letters
Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Ravenel,
Private Journal, 222; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Re¬
port of the Joint Committee on Reconstruc¬
tion, Part II, 55, 228; Williamson, After
Slavery, 97.

67. William E. Bayley to Commanding
Officer, Vicksburg, July 3,1865, Records of
the Assistant Commissioners, Mississippi
(Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau;
Heyward, Seed from Madagascar, 142; 39
Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, Part III, 167; New York
Times, Aug. 22, 1865; Myers (ed.), Children
of Pride, 1323; B. F. Blow vs. Jerry Marvast
and Abram Marvast (freedmen), Lowndes
County, before J. A. Pruitt, Justice of the
Peace (acting as agent of the Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau), Sept. 12, 1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Alabama (Letters
Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Stearns,
Black Man of the South, and The Rebels,
170-71.

68. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
229; Rogers, History of Georgetown County,
433.

69. Felix Shank to Capt. M. Whalen,
July 14,1868, including contract with freed-
man, Feb. 5, 1868, Joseph Belknap Smith
Papers, Duke Univ.; Andrews, The South
since the War, 206; New York Times, Aug.
20,1865. On Saturday and Sunday work, see
also S. D. G. Niles to Maj. Gen. T. J. Wood,
June 13,1866, James DeGrey to William H.
Webster, Sept. 10, 1867, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, Mississippi and Lou¬
isiana (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau; Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 12; Stearns, Black Man
of the South, and The Rebels, 46; Dennett,
The South As It Is, 222.

70. William H. Stiles to his wife [Eliza¬
beth A. Mackay], Sept. 22, 1865, Mackay-

608

Notes to pages 418-25

Stiles Collection, Univ. of North Carolina;
Reid, After the War, 530.

71. Andrews, The South since the War,
203; R. H. Willoughby to Bvt. Maj. A. M.
Crawford, July 27, 1867, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, South Carolina (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Reid,
After the War, 572-73.

72. Andrews, The South since the War,
204; Lt. George Parliss to Lt. Stuart El-
dridge, April 9, 1866, Maj. M. R. Delany to
Bvt. Lt. Col. H. W. Smith, Aug. 1, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi and South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; 39 Cong., 2
Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 6, Reports of the As¬
sistant Commissioners ofFreedmen [Jan. 3,
1867], 51-52; New York Times, Sept. 12,
1866; De Forest, Union Officer in the Recon¬
struction, 29.

73. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 157;
Col. J. L. Haynes to Capt. B. F. Henry, July
8, 1865, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, Mississippi (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; Richardson, Negro in
the Reconstruction of Florida, 64; Bvt. Maj.
Thomas H. Norton to Maj. A. W. Preston,
Aug. 3, 1867, B. F. Blow vs. Jerry Marvast
and Abram Marvast (freedmen), Lowndes
County, before J. A. Pruitt, Justice of the
Peace (acting as agent of the Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau), Sept. 12, 1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi and
Alabama (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau.

74. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 121;
S. D. G. Niles to Maj. Gen. T. J. Wood, June
16,1866, Lorenzo James to Brig. Gen. Wager
Swayne, Aug. 16,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi and Ala¬
bama (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau.

75. Dennett, The South As It Is, 56.

76. Armstrong and Ludlow, Hampton
and Its Students, 79-80.

77. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
191; Trowbridge, The South, 363-64. For ad¬
ditional examples of freedmen defrauded of
their pay or shares, see Rawick (ed.), Ameri¬
can Slave, HI: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 15; V:
Texas Narr. (Part 4), 117; XIV: N.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 49, 420; Bvt. Brig. Gen. Alvin C.
Voris to Maj. George A. Hicks, Oct. 2,1865,

Brock Collection, Henry E. Huntington Li¬
brary; Maj. M. R. Delany to Bvt. Lt. Col. H.
W. Smith, Aug. 1, 1866, H. S. Van Eaton to
Bvt. Maj. Gen. A. C. Gillem, Nov. 24, 1867,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina and Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Andrews, The
South since the War, 322-23, 368; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 362-64; Loyal Georgian,
Jan. 27,1866; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
52, 222, 225, 259.

78. Christian Recorder ; March 31,
1866. See also Dennett, The South As It Is,
331-32, 338-39.

79. Wiley, "Vicissitudes of Early Re¬
construction Farming in the Lower Missis¬
sippi Valley,” 448; Wilmer Shields to
William Newton Mercer, Dec. 19,1865, Mer¬
cer Papers, Louisiana State Univ.; Rogers,
History of Georgetown County, 432.

80. Eppes, Negro of the Old South,
128-29; Reid, After the War, 527; Andrews,
The South since the War, 322; Leigh, Ten
Years on a Georgia Plantation, 76.

81. Reid, After the War, 527-28.

82. Trowbridge, The South, 366; Rich¬
ardson, Negro in the Reconstruction of
Florida, 60; 40 Cong., 2 Sess., House Exec.
Doc. 1, Report of the Commissioner of the
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Aban¬
doned Lands, November 1, 1867, 681; Col¬
ored Tennessean, Oct. 4, 1865.

83. Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia
Plantation, 76-77; Bvt. Maj. Thomas H.
Norton to Maj. A. W. Preston, Aug. 3, 1867,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau. See also Dennett, The South As It
Is, 332, 338.

84. De Forest, Union Officer in the Re¬
construction, 73-75. See also Capt. A. Pres¬
ton to Lt. Stuart Eldridge, June 7, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau.

85. Trowbridge, The South, 363; Mac¬
rae, Americans at Home, 323-24; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, VII: Okla. Narr., 283;
Maj. and Bvt. Lt. Col. J. E. Cornelius to Bvt.
Maj. Edward L. Deane, Dec. 22, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau. See also Ames, From a New

Notes to pages 426-30

609

England Woman's Diary in Dixie, 120, and
WPA, Negro in Virginia, 221.

86. Donald MacRae to Julia MacRae,
Sept. 4, 1865, MacRae Papers, Duke Univ.;
Dr. Ethelred Philips to Dr. James J. Philips,
Aug. 2, 1865, James J. Philips Collection,
Univ. of North Carolina. For fears and ex¬
pectations of an "emancipation insurrec¬
tion,” see also Edward Lynch to Joseph
Glover [c. June 1865], John W. Burbidge to
Joseph Glover, July 28,1865, Glover-North
Papers, Univ. of South Carolina; A. R. Sal¬
ley to "My Dear Aunt,” Nov. 13, 1865,
Bruce-Jones-Murchison Papers, Univ. of
South Carolina; Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Di¬
ary, entries for Nov. 3,21, 22,1865, Univ. of
North Carolina; Jabez Curry to Gov. Lewis
Parsons, Sept. 29, 1865, John Swanson to
Gov. Parsons, Oct. 3,1865, Thomas Smith to
Capt. J. H. Weber, Nov. 3, 1865, Records of
the Assistant Commissioners, Alabama
(Curry and Swanson) and Mississippi
(Smith) (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau; South Carolina Leader, Dec. 23,1865;
New Orleans Tribune, Oct. 21, 1865; New
York Times, Nov. 12, 1865; Dennett, The
South As It Is, 190,275; Andrews, The South
since the War, 27; Reid, After the War, 386-
87; Williamson, After Slavery, 249-52;
Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 59, 218-19.

87. Sebastian Kraft to President An¬
drew Johnson, Aug. [April?] 28, 1865,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau; Reid, After the War, 386;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 190.

88. Williamson, After Slavery, 249-50,
250-51; Reid, After the War, 387n.-89n.

89. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part III,
30; John P. Bardwell to Rev. M. E. Strieby,
Nov. 4, 1865, American Missionary Assn.
Archives; Moore (ed.), The Juki Letters (Oct.
28,1865), 51; South Carolina Leader, Dec. 9,
1865; Dennett, The South As It Is, 240-41;
Col. James C. Beecher to Maj. Kinsman, Oct.
7,1865, W. E. Towne to Bvt. Maj. Gen. Sax¬
ton, Aug. 17,1865, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau.

90. Andrews, War-Time Journal of a
Georgia Girl, 315-16; Leigh, Ten Years on a
Georgia Plantation, 35-37; D. E. H. Smith
(ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters, 232-33,

237; Ella Gertrude (Clanton) Thomas, Ms.
Journal, entry for July 23, 1865, Duke
Univ.; Williamson, After Slavery, 250-51,
and the sources cited in note 86.

91. Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Diary, en¬
tries for Nov. 3, 24, 1865, Univ. of North
Carolina; W. E. Towne to Bvt. Maj. Gen. Sax¬
ton, Aug. 17,1865, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau. See also
Wilmer Shields to William N. Mercer, Dec.
19, 1865, Mercer Papers, Louisiana State
Univ.; Dennett, The South As It Is, 240; An¬
drews, The South since the War, 27; New
Orleans Tribune, Oct. 21, 1865; D. E. H.
Smith (ed.), Mason Smith Family Letters,
232; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 532;
Thomas Smith to Capt. J. H. Weber, Nov. 3,
1865, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, Mississippi (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau.

92. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part HI,
142; South Carolina Leader, Dec. 16, 1865;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 193; New York
Times, Sept. 7, Dec. 1,1865; Williamson, Af¬
ter Slavery, 251-52; Wharton, Negro in Re¬
construction, 59, 218; Evans, Ballots and
Fence Rails, 130.

93. New Orleans Tribune, Oct. 21, Dec.
27, 1865, Dec. 19, 1867; South Carolina
Leader, Dec. 23, 1865; Christian Recorder,
Dec. 30, 1865, Feb. 24, 1866; New York
Times, Dec. 31, 1865.

94. New Orleans Tribune, Oct. 21,
1865; Andrews, The South since the War,
207.

95. Burge, Diary, 114; Dennett, The
South As It Is, 275; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report
of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction,
Part II, 192, Part HI, 30, 31; New York
Times, Dec. 27,28,29,1865; Moore (ed.), The
Juhl Letters (Dec. 25,1865), 57; Evans, Bal¬
lots and Fence Rails, 131; Samuel A. Agnew,
Ms. Diary, entry for Nov. 26,1865, Univ. of
North Carolina.

96. Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice
Plantation, 224-25; Leigh, Ten Years on a
Georgia Plantation, 131-32. See also New
Orleans Tribune, Dec. 19, 1867.

97. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 204-06. See also Christian
Recorder, Feb. 24,1866. The Emancipation
Day celebration in Richmond is described

610

Notes to pages 431-38

in Haviland, A Woman's Life-Work, 401-

02 .

98. Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Diary, en¬
tries for Dec. 5, 25, 1865, Univ. of North
Carolina; Wilmer Shields to William N.
Mercer, Dec. 19,1865, Mercer Papers, Loui¬
siana State Univ.; Easterby (ed.), South
Carolina Rice Plantation, 215-16; Capt. D.
Corbin to H. W. Smith, Feb. 1,1866, Records
of the Assistant Commissioners, South
Carolina (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau. See also Dennett, The South As It Is,
188.

99. E. W. Everson to Bvt. Maj. Edward
Deane, Jan. 17, 1867, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, South Carolina (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Moore
(ed.), The Juhl Letters (Jan. 29,1866), 73-74;
Montgomery, "Alabama Freedmen: Some
Reconstruction Documents,” 250; New York
Times, Jan. 8,1866; Kolchin, First Freedom,
9-10; Williamson, After Slavery, 39,105-06.

100. Ravenel, Private Journal, 272;
Eppes, Negro of the Old South, 128,130-31.

101. New York Times, Feb. 28, 1868;
39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Com¬
mittee on Reconstruction, Part III, 167; Reid,
After the War, 446-47. See also 39 Cong., 1
Sess., House Exec. Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau, 273; Sarah M. Payne to Mary Clenden-
in, Dec. 14,1867, Historical Society of Penn¬
sylvania; and Reid, After the War, 455.

102. Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia
Plantation, 87-91.

103. Bragg, Louisiana in the Confeder¬
acy, 213-14; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 236-
37; Allen S. Izard to Mrs. William Mason
Smith, Sept. 26,1865, in D. E. H. Smith (ed.),
Mason Smith Family Letters, 236.

104. South Carolina Leader, Dec. 9,
1865; Dennett, The South As It Is, 203. For
black views on the respective merits of the
share and wage systems, see also Maj. M. R.
Delany to Bvt. Lt. Col. H. W. Smith, Aug. 1,
1866, and B. F. Randolph to Bvt. Maj. Gen.
R. K. Scott, Aug. 6,1867, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, South Carolina (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau.

105. Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia
Plantation, 90-91; Reid, After the War, 507;
Williamson, After Slavery, 93-94; Contract
between Elias H. Deas and freedmen, March
3, 1866, Deas Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina; Contract between Felix Shank and

freedman, Feb. 5, 1868, and between A. J.
and J. W. Shank and Enos, Jan. 5, 1867,
Joseph Belknap Smith Papers, Duke Univ.;
Reid, After the War, 464; Lt. George Parliss
to Lt. Stuart Eldridge, April 9,1866, James
DeGrey to Lt. J. M. Lee, Nov. 10, 1867,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi and Louisiana (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau. The demand
for a five-day workweek (which no working
class, white or black, enjoyed in 1865) may
also be found in John H. Bills, Ms. Diary,
entry for Sept. 9, 1865, Univ. of North
Carolina; Wilmer Shields to William N.
Mercer, Dec. 12,1866, Mercer Papars, Loui¬
siana State Univ.; S. D. G. Niles to Maj. Gen.
T. J. Wood, June 13, 1866, Records of the
Assistant Commissioners, Mississippi (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; Loring
and Atkinson, Cotton Culture and the South,
12; Williamson, After Slavery, 91-92.

106. Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, en¬
try for Jan. 15, 1866, Univ. of South
Carolina; Rogers, History of Georgetown
County, 431-32; Williamson, After Slavery,
104-05.

107. Wilmer Shields to William N.
Mercer, Sept. 21, Nov. 18, 21, Dec. 1,12, 26,

1866, Jan. 1, 6, 9, 16, Feb. 6, 13, May 22,

1867, Mercer Papers, Louisiana State Univ.

108. John H. Bills, Ms. Diary, entry
for July 29, 1865, Univ. of North Carolina;
Easterby (ed.), South Carolina Rice Planta¬
tion, 223; Williamson, After Slavery, 100;
Samuel A. Agnew, Ms. Diary, entries for
Jan. 1, 3, 1867, Univ. of North Carolina;
Reid, After the War, 446-47.

109. Joe M. Richardson (ed.), "A
Northerner Reports on Florida: 1866,”
Florida Historical Quarterly, XL (1962), 383;
Esther W. Douglass to Rev. Samuel Hunt,
Feb. 1,1866, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives.

110. Lt. George Parliss to Lt. Stuart
Eldridge, April 9, 1866, Bvt. Lt. Col. B. F.
Smith to Bvt. Maj. H. W. Smith, Jan. 21,
1866, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, Mississippi and South Carolina (Letters
Received), Freedmen’s Bureau. See also New
York Times, Nov. 30, 1866, and Stearns,
Black Man of the South, and The Rebels,
47-48.

111. Bvt. Maj. Thomas H. Norton to
Maj. A. W. Preston, Aug. 3,1867, Lt. George

Notes to pages 438-45

611

Parties to Lt. Stuart Eldridge, April 9,1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau. See also, in the South Carolina
records, Bvt. Maj. Erastus Everson to Bvt.
Lt. Col. H. W. Smith, June 15,1866, and M.
J. Kirk to Maj. M. R. Delany, May 24,1866.

112. Edmund Rhett to Maj. Gen. Scott,
Aug. 12,1866, James DeGrey to William H.
Webster, Sept. 10, 1867, Bvt. Lt. Col. B. F.
Smith to Bvt. Maj. H. W. Smith, Feb. 21,
1866, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, South Carolina (Rhett and Smith) and
Louisiana (DeGrey) (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; New York Times,^ Sept.
5, 1867; Steams, Black Man of the South,
and The Rebels , 47-48.

113. Moore (ed.), The Juhl Letters
(Nov. 17, 1866), 134-37; New York Times,
June 22, Aug. 16,1866. See also New Orleans
Tribune, Sept. 27, 1865; New York Times,
Aug. 17, Dec. 5, 1866; and, for a joint white-
black protest in Raleigh on rents, Fisk P.
Brewer to George Whipple, May 27, 1867,
American Missionary Assn. Archives.

114. Lt. James M. Johnston to Bvt.
Maj. A. M. Crawford, Dec. 17,1866, Records
of the Assistant Commissioners, South
Carolina (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau. See also New York Times, Dec. 30,
1866; J. R. Grady (sheriff, Liltington, Har¬
nett Co.) to Post Commander, Aug. 27,1867,
E. W. Everson to Bvt. Maj. Edward Deane,
Jan. 17,18, 1867, Everson to Lt. Crawford,
June 19,1867, Records ofthe Assistant Com¬
missioners, North Carolina and South
Carolina (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau.

115. [name deleted] to Gov. Jonathan
Worth, Nov. 29,1866, in Gov. Worth to Col.
Bomford, Dec. 3,1866, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, North Carolina (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau.

116. J. J. Pringle Smith to Mrs. Robert
Smith, Jan. 13,1867, in D. E. H. Smith (ed.),
Mason Smith Family Letters, 273; Rogers,
History of Georgetown County, 433; James
DeGrey to Lt. J. M. Lee, Nov. 15, 1867,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Louisiana (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau.

117. Reid, After the War, 546-50.

118. Lt. Erastus Everson to Bvt. Maj.
Henry W. Smith, Jan. 30, 1866, R. H. Wil¬

loughby to Bvt. Maj. A. M. Crawford, July

27, 1867, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, South Carolina (Letters Received),
and J. J. Wright to Bvt. Gen. Gile, June 3,
1867, Records ofthe Subdivision of Beaufort,
S.C., Freedmen’s Bureau.

119. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather,
202-03; Lt. and Bvt. Brig. Gen. H. Neide to
Bvt. Maj. Edward L. Deane, Feb. 9, 1867,
Bvt. Maj. Gen. R. K. Scott to Maj. Gen. O. O.
Howard, Feb. 14,1867, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, South Carolina (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau.

120. Workingman's Advocate, April

28, June 2,1866; New York Times, April 18,
May 24, Dec. 6,1866, Feb. 10, May 15, June
15, 1867; Taylor, Negro in the Reconstruc¬
tion of Virginia, 120.

121. New Orleans Tribune, May 17,
1867; Trowbridge, The South, 405.

122. Christian Recorder, Dec. 2,1865;
New Orleans Tribune, Dec. 20,22,23,24,25,
1865.

123. Williamson, After Slavery, 92-93.
For the action of a Bureau officer in the
South Carolina low country when faced with
a "combination” among the blacks on sev¬
eral plantations, see Capt. D. Corbin to H.
W. Smith, Feb. 1,1866, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, South Carolina (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau.

124. South Carolina Leader, Dec. 16,
1865; Reid, After the War, 464. See also Den¬
nett, The South As It Is, 247.

125. Dennett, The South As It Is, 15,
114-15, 276-77; Colored American, Jan. 6,
1866; Moore (ed.), The Juhl Letters (July 4,
1866), 103; Bvt. Lt. Col. B. F. Smith to Bvt.
Maj. H. W. Smith, Jan. 21,1866, Records of
the Assistant Commissioners, South
Carolina (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau.

126. Everard Green Baker, Ms. Diary,
entries for Dec. 26,1862, May 31,1865, Jan.
13, July 17, 1866, May 29, 1867, Univ. of
North Carolina; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, 90.

127. Easterby (ed.), South Carolina
Rice Plantation, 18-19; Dr. Ethelred Philips
to Dr. James J. Philips, Aug. 2, Oct. 24,1865,
Nov. 8,1866, June 17, Dec. 1,1867, James J.
Philips Collection, Univ. of North Carolina.

128. Myers (ed.), Children of Pride,
1340-41,1366,1369,1374,1376,1403,1429.

612

Notes to pages 446-58

129. Moore, (ed.), The Juki Letters
(Oct. 7, 1866), 125; Trowbridge, The South ,
545.

130. Lt. Erastus Everson to Bvt. Maj.
Henry W. Smith, Jan. 30,1866, Bvt. Lt. Col.
B. F. Smith to Bvt. Maj. Henry W. Smith,
Jan. 21,1866, Records of the Assistant Com¬
missioners, South Carolina (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; Autobiography
of Oliver Otis Howard, II, 239; Andrews, The
South since the War, 212.

131. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 4; Reid, After the War,
463; Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Planta¬
tion, 57-58, 78-79. For other examples of
the yearning for landownership and the
movement toward tenantry, see Loring and
Atkinson, Cotton Culture and the South,
5, 14, 121, 145; Ravenel, Private Journal,
272; Reid, After the War, 533; Trowbridge,

The South, 362; Macrae, Americans at
Home, 210; Christian Recorder, Dec. 30,
1865; National Freedman, I (Nov. 15,1865),
337.

132. For examples of "tenantry” con¬
tracts, see Dennett, The South As It Is, 282-
83. See also ibid., 108-09.

133. Loring and Atkinson, Cotton Cul¬
ture and the South, 13.

134. Rawick (ed.), American Slave,
VHI: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 63-64.

135. Andrews, The South since the
War, 370 (also reprinted in New York Times,
Jan. 7, 1866). For a similar assessment, see
Botume, First Days Amongst the Contra¬
bands, 197.

136. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV:
Texas Narr. (Part 2), 134.

137. Ibid, XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1),
361-62.

Chapter Nine: The Gospel and the Primer

1. Christian Recorder, May 26, 1866.

2. Reid, After the War, 510.

3. Christian Recorder, Jan. 31, 1863,
Feb. 25, Aug. 5, Dec. 30,1865, Jan. 20,1866.

4. B. F. Randolph to Bvt. Maj. Gen.
Rufus Saxton, Aug. 31,1865, Records of the
Assistant Commissioners, South Carolina
(Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau.

5. Christian Recorder, April 15, 1865
(editorial); Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruc¬
tion, 217; James M. McPherson, "The New
Puritanism: Values and Goals of Freed¬
men’s Education in America,” in Lawrence
Stone (ed.), The University in Society (2 vols.;
Princeton, 1974), II, 615; Daniel A. Payne,
Recollections of Seventy Years (Nashville,
1888; repr. New York, 1969), 163n.

6. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 24;
American Freedman, III (April 1868), 400.
On the problems missionaries encountered
with black speech, see also Swint (ed.), Dear
Ones at Home, 62; Pearson (ed.). Letters from
Port Royal, 34-35, 90; Botume, First Days
Amongst the Contrabands, 277.

7. Christian Recorder, Sept. 29, 1866.

8. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V:
Texas Narr. (Part 4), 184.

9. Thomas W. Cardozo to Samuel
Hunt, June 23,1865, Thomas D. S. Tucker to

"Dear Friends of the Association,” Nov. 27,
1862, Tucker to George Whipple, Dec. 24,
1862, American Missionary Assn. Archives.

10. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New
York, 1952), 3.

11. Christian Recorder, Sept. 7, 1861,
June 27, 1863.

12. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 234;
Christian Recorder, July 25, 1863.

13. Christian Recorder, May 27,1865.

14. J. W. C. Pennington to "My Es¬
teemed Friend,” May 25, 1870, American
Missionary Assn. Archives; Christian
Recorder, June 29, 1867. See also Amos
Gerry Beman to Rev. George Whipple, Feb.
25,1867, in "Documents,” Journal of Negro
History, XXII (1937), 222-26.

15. Christian Recorder, June 16,1866
(H. M. Turner and A. Waddell letters).

16. Marcia Colton to Rev. George
Whipple, May 19, June 14, July 9, Oct. 7,
Nov. 1, 1864, American Missionary Assn.
Archives.

17. Christian Recorder, July 1, March
18, 1865; Thomas W. Cardozo to Samuel
Hunt, June 23, 1865, American Missionary
Assn. Archives; Elizabeth Kilham,
"Sketches in Color: IV,” in Jackson (ed.),
The Negro and His Folklore, 133. For the

Notes to pages 459-68

613

reactions of white missionaries to black reli¬
gious worship in the South, see the sources
cited in notes 19 and 20.

18. Christian Recorder , July 14, 1866
(editorial); Timothy Lyman to Rev. M. E.
Strieby, Feb, 27,1865, American Missionary
Assn. Archives.

19. Rev. Joel Grant to Prof. Henry
Cowles, April 10,1863, H. S. Beals to Rev. S.
S. Jocelyn, April 28, 1863, Martha L. Kel¬
logg to Rev. S. S. Jocelyn, Sept. 3, 1863,
American Missionary Assn. Archives; Na¬
tional Freedman, I (Sept. 15,1865), 264 (Rev.
Henry J. Fox); New York Times, Nov. 28,
1863. See also Waterbury, Seven Years
Among the Freedmen, 18-19, and Macrae,
Americans at Home, 353-75.

20. H. S. Beals to Rev. S. S. Jocelyn,
April 28, Aug. 18,1863, William G. Kephart
to Lewis Tappan, May 9,1864, Augustus C.
Stickle to Jacob R. Shipherd, July 9, 1867,
Timothy Lyman to Rev. M. E. Strieby, Feb.
27, 1865, Rev. W. T. Richardson to Rev.
George Whipple, July 3,1863, Mary E. Bur¬
dick to Rev. George Whipple, March 8,1864,
American Missionary Assn. Archives; Na¬
tional Freedman, I (Oct. 15,1865), 285 (M. J.
Ringler); Towne, Letters and Diary, 20;
Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home, 21-22, 58.
See also Pearson (ed.), Letters from Port
Royal, 26-28; Ames, From a New England
Woman’s Diary in Dixie, 81-82; Higginson,
Army Life in a Black Regiment, 17-18.

21. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, HI:
S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 5; Higginson, Army Life
in a Black Regiment, 253.

22. Swint, The Northern Teacher in
the South, 42; Timothy Lyman to Rev. M. E.
Strieby, Feb. 27,1865, H. S. Beals to Rev. S.
S. Jocelyn, April 28, 1863, William G. Ke¬
phart to Lewis Tappan, May 9,1864, Louise
A. Woodbury to Rev. S. S. Jocelyn, Sept. 7,
1863, American Missionary Assn. Archives.

23. Kilham, "Sketches in Color: IV,”
in Jackson (ed.), The Negro and His Folklore,
125-31.

24. Christian Recorder, Aug. 5, 1865.
On the "peculiar fitness” of blacks for mis¬
sionary and teaching positions in the South,
see also, e.g., ibid., Nov. 28,1863 (editorial),
Feb. 6,1864 (R. H. Cain and T. H. C. Hinton),
Feb. 11 (J. Lynch), March 18 ("Junius”),
April 15 (editorial), Sept. 9 (J. Lynch), Sept.

23 (A. Crummell), 1865, Feb. 24, 1866, and
June 29, 1867 (R. H. Cain).

25. Sella Martin to M. E. Strieby,
March 20,1866, American Missionary Assn.
Archives; Christian Recorder, Feb. 11,1865
(James H. Payne).

26. Towne, Letters and Diary, 55;
Christian Recorder, June 16,1866 (A. Wad¬
dell), Dec. 30 and Aug. 5, 1865 (H. M.
Turner). For commendation of the work of
the white benevolent societies, especially
the American Missionary Assn, and the Na¬
tional Freedmen’s Relief Assn., see, e.g.,
Christian Recorder, June 3, 1865 (Meeting
of the South Carolina Conference), and Feb.
27, 1864 (J. Lynch).

27. Edward P. Smith to M. E. Strieby,
July 21, 1865, American Missionary Assn.
Archives; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 495, 420; Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 198, (Part 2),
167; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the
Wheat, 322. On ex-slave recollections of
white preachers, see also, e.g., Blassingame
(ed.), Slave Testimony, 420,538,642; Rawick
(ed.), American Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part
3), 213, (Part 4), 7; VHI and X: Ark. Narr.
(Part 1), 35, (Part 2), 294, (Part 5), 36-37;
XVHI: Unwritten History, 45, 76, 98, 310.

28. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 643; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, H:
S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 241; IV: Texas Narr.
(Part 1), 199; Haviland, A Woman’s Life-
Work, 321.

29. Rev. L. S. Burkhead, "History of
the Difficulties of the Pastorate of the Front
Street Methodist Church, Wilmington, N.C.,
for the Year 1865,” in An Annual Publica¬
tion of Historical Papers Published by the
Historical Society of Trinity College, Dur¬
ham, NC, Series VHI (1908-4)9), 35-118.
For a black view of the "difficulties,” see
Christian Recorder, April 15, 1865 ("Ar¬
nold”).

30. Christian Recorder, Feb. 24, 1866
(R. H. Cain), Jan. 21 and Feb. 4, 1865 (J.
Lynch), March 24, 1866 (H. M. Turner). See
also ibid., Jan. 29,1870 ("Our Record”).

31. Ibid., Oct. 14, 1865, Sept. 8, 1866;
Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II: S.C. Narr.
(Part 1), 35-36.

32. H. Shelton Smith, In His Image,
But...: Racism in Southern Religion, 1780-

614

Notes to pages 468-74

1910 (Durham, N.C, 1972), 229-31; Ralph E.
Morrow, Northern Methodism and Recon¬
struction (East Lansing, Mich., 1956), 129;
Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, 260-61; Wil¬
liamson, After Slavery, 196-97; Kolchin,
First Freedom, 111-13.

33. Morrow, Northern Methodism and
Reconstruction, 136; Christian Recorder,
March 5, 1870 ("Separate Churches”),
March 26,1864 (J. D. S. Hall), June 17,1865
(R. H. Cain). For the struggle between the
AME and the Methodist Episcopal Church,
including the conflicts over church property,
see also Christian Recorder, March 12 (J. D.
S. Hall), June 25 (J. Lynch), 1864, April 15
("Arnold”), May 13 (H. M. Turner), June 3
(S.C. Conference), Aug. 5 and Oct. 7 (H. R.
Revels), Oct. 21 (J. Lynch), 1865, Sept. 21,
1867 ("True Position of AME Church”); Cop-
pin, Unwritten History, 117-18; Morrow,
Northern Methodism and Reconstruction,
139-40; and Williamson, After Slavery, 181-
91.

34. Reid, After the War, 519-20; Rev.
A. G. Smith to "Dear Sir,” Sept. 25, 1867,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
North Carolina (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau.

35. Avary, Dixie after the War, 203-
04.

36. Mobile News, reprinted in New Or¬
leans Tribune, Sept. 9, 1865. See also Kol¬
chin, First Freedom, 118-19.

37. New York Times, July 1, 1867;
Christian Recorder, June 16,1866. The war
had exacerbated the sectional split in the
national churches, prompting some south¬
ern whites to prefer that black congrega¬
tions affiliate with the independent black
churches rather than with the MEC (North).
Christian Recorder, Oct. 21,1865 (J. Lynch),
Sept. 21, 1867 ("True Position of the AME
Church”).

38. New York Times, Nov. 28,1863.

39. Missionary Record, reprinted in
Semi-Weekly Louisianian, April 21, 1872;
Christian Recorder, May 26,1866 (Address
of the Bishops). For criticism of ministers in
politics, see Christian Recorder, Feb. 1,
1868, and Louisianian, Feb. 16, 1871.

40. Christian Recorder, Jan. 29, 1870
("Our Record”). On the activities of H. M.
Turner, see ibid., June 9, 1866, Aug. 17,
1867, Feb. 1,1868, March 6, 1869; on R. H.

Cain, ibid., Sept. 8, 1866, and Williamson,
After Slavery, 206-07; on J. C. Gibbs, Chris¬
tian Recorder, Sept. 16, 1865, Sept. 8, 1866,
and Richardson, Negro in the Reconstruction
of Florida, 94; on J. Lynch, Christian
Recorder, June 8, 22, 1867, Weekly

Louisianian, Jan. 4,1873, and Wharton, Ne¬
gro in Mississippi, 154-55.

41. Macrae, Americans at Home, 368.

42. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 598; Missionary Record (Charleston),
July 5, 1873; J. W. Alvord, Eighth Semi-
Annual Report on Schools for Freedmen,
July 1, 1869 (Washington, D.C., 1869), 46.

43. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 562;
Reid, After the War, 145.

44. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Wash¬
ington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-
1901 (New York, 1972), 14; Washington, Up
from Slavery, 6-7, 26-32, 37.

45. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 259; Blassingame (ed.), Slave
Testimony, 174.

46. Dennett, The South As It Is, 322;
Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 46. On
the theme of "knowledge is power,” see also,
e.g., "State Convention of the Colored Peo¬
ple of South Carolina,” in South Carolina
Leader, Nov. 25,1865; Loyal Georgian, Jan.
20,1866; and 39 Cong., 1 Sess., House Exec.
Doc. 70, Freedmen’s Bureau, 334.

47. National Freedman, I (Aug. 15,
1865), 217 (W. T. Briggs); (Dec. 15,1865), 350
(S. K. Whiting); Quarles, Negro in the Civil
War, 292; Waterbury, Seven Years Among
the Freedmen, 81. For the intensity of the
freedmen’s commitment to education, see
also, e.g., Esther W. Douglass to Rev. Samuel
Hunt, Dec. 27, 1865, American Missionary
Assn. Archives; South Carolina Leader, Dec.
9, 1865; National Freedman, 1 (Dec. 15,
1865), 351-52 (H. C. Fisher); American
Freedman, I (June 1866), 46 (G. H. Allan);
Botume, First Days Amongst the Contra¬
bands, 57; Trowbridge, The South, 251; 39
Cong., 2 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 6, Reports
of the Assistant Commissioners of Freedmen
[Jan. 3, 1867], 105; Alvord, Eighth Semi-
Annual Report on Schools for Freedmen,
July 1, 1869, 45.

48. Murray, Proud Shoes, 182; Mrs.
William L. Coan to M. E. Strieby, Sept. 23,
1864, American Missionary Assn. Archives;
Waterbury, Seven Years Among the Freed-

Notes to pages 475-79

615

men, 19; Asa B. Whitfield to Julia A. Shear¬
man, April 17, 1867, American Missionary
Assn. Archives. For the appeals of two black
teachers for assistance, see Jonathan J.
Wright to Rev. Samuel Hunt, Dec. 4, 1865,
Feb. 5, 1866, and T. G. Steward to John A.
Rockwell, Nov. 6, 1867, American Mission¬
ary Assn. Archives.

49. Trowbridge, The South, 466; Na¬
tional Freedman, I (April 1,1865), 93 (M. E.
Jones and N. J. McCullough); Harriet B.
Greeley to Rev. George Whipple, April 29,
1865, American Missionary Assn. Archives.
On the difficulty of adjusting work schedules
to schooling, see also Rawick (ed.), American
Slave, XIH: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 117; XIV:
N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 277; XVI: Tenn. Narr.,
29; American Freedman, III (June 1868), 431
(L. M. Towne); and Helen M. Jones to S. G.
Wright, Jan. 13,1866, American Missionary
Assn. Archives.

50. J. W. Alvord, Report on Schools
and Finances of Freedmen for July, 1866
(Washington, D.C., 1866), 16 (Helena, Ark.);
Ames, From a New England Woman's Diary
in Dixie, 108-09 (Seabrook); New York
Times, Jan. 13, 19, 1862 (Lawrence); Wil¬
liamson, After Slavery, 211 (Charleston);
Reid, After the War, 246 (New Orleans); W.
T. Richardson to M. E. Strieby, Jan. 2, 1865
(Savannah), and Rev. W. F. Eaton to Rev.
George Whipple, May 26,1865 (King planta¬
tion, St. Simon’s Island), American Mission¬
ary Assn. Archives; Colored Tennessean,
March 24, 1866 (Douglass school); National
Freedman, I (Feb. 1, 1865), 11-12 (Savan¬
nah); Trowbridge, The South, 490 (Augusta),
509-10 (Savannah). See also Swint, North¬
ern Teacher in the South, 79-80 (Richmond);
Wiley, Southern Negroes, 271 (La.); Trow¬
bridge, The South, 337 (Tenn.); Haviland, A
Woman’s Life- Work, 321-22 (New Orleans);
New York Tribune, July 7,1865 (Richmond).

51. Colored Tennessean, Oct. 14,1865;
J. W. Alvord, Fourth Semi-Annual Report on
Schools for Freedmen, July 1, 1867 (Wash-
ington, D.C., 1867), 83, and Ninth Semi-
Annual Report on Schools for Freedmen,
January 1, 1870 (Washington, D.C., 1870),
46; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas
Narr. (Part 2), 48. On the plantation schools,
see also J. W. Alvord, Third Semi-Annual
Report on Schools for Freedmen, January 1,

1867 (Washington, D.C., 1867), 25-26; Col¬
ored Tennessean, March 24,1866; B. F. Ran¬
dolph to Bvt. Maj. Gen. R. K. Scott, March
15, 1867, Records of the Assistant Commis¬
sioners, South Carolina (Letters Received),
Freedmen’s Bureau; S. S. Ashley to Rev.
Samuel Hunt, March 7, 1866, American
Missionary Assn. Archives; National Freed¬
man, n (April 1866), 118 (F. A. Fiske); Wa-
terbury, Seven Years Among the Freedmen,
18; Steams, Black Man of the South, and
The Rebels, 196-99; Trowbridge, The South,
289; Reid, After the War, 511; New York
Times, Oct. 17, 1865, May 27,1867.

52. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 199-
200; Mary E. Burdick to George Whipple,
March 8, 1864, American Missionary Assn.
Archives.

53. McPherson, "The New Puri¬
tanism: Values and Goals of Freedmen’s Ed¬
ucation in America,” 624-25. On the
educational work of the Freedmen’s Bureau,
see, in addition to the archival records and
official reports, Abbott, Freedmen’s Bureau
in South Carolina, 82-98; White, Freed¬
men s Bureau in Louisiana, 166-200; and
Bentley, History of the Freedmen’s Bureau,
169-84.

54. Marcia Colton to Rev. George
Whipple, June 14, 1864, American Mission¬
ary Assn. Archives; Lydia Maria Child to
Sarah S. Shaw, April 8, 1866, Shaw Family
Papers, New York Public Library; American
Freedman, I (April 1866), 3 (editorial). See
also National Freedman, I (March 1,1865),
44 (annual report).

55. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 31-32; Josiah Beardsley, Feb.
15, 1865, Marcia Colton to Rev. George
Whipple, June 14,1864, American Mission¬
ary Assn. Archives; Ames, From a New En¬
gland Woman’s Diary in Dixie, 25-26; Rose,
Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 58. On mis¬
sionary comparisons of the blacks and the
Irish, see also Towne, Letters and Diary, 6;
Pearson (ed.), Letters from Port Royal, 11,
15,18, 75.

56. George N. Greene to George Whip¬
ple, May 15,1865, H. S. Beals to Rev. Samuel
Hunt, Dec. 30, 1865, Frank H. Green to
George Whipple, July 7, 1864, American
Missionary Assn. Archives; Swint, Northern
Teacher in the South, 41; National Freed-

616

Notes to pages 480-86

man, I (Feb. 1, 1865), 14 (Juliet B. Smith);
American Freedman, HI (April 1869), 7
(Lucy Eastman).

57. National Freedman, I (April 1,

1865) , 92 (Fannie Graves and Annie P. Mer-
riam); S. S. Ashley to Col. N. A. McLean,
Feb. 7,1866, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives.

58. Towne, Letters and Diary, 26; New
National Era, April 13,1871. On the respec¬
tive merits of practical and classical educa¬
tion, see also New Era, May 5,1870 ("Genius
and Its Exactions”).

59. Christian Recorder, Aug. 5, 1865;
Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 291; Wiley,
Southern Negroes, 287. On the content of
instruction, see also, e.g., Swint, Northern
Teacher in the South, 80-90; Towne, Letters
and Diary, 163; Extracts from Letters of
Teachers and Superintendents of the New
England Educational Commission for
Freedmen (4th Series, Jan. 1,1864; Boston,
1864), 8-10; Stearns, Black Man in the
South, and The Rebels, 59-64; Christian
Recorder, Sept. 29, 1866 ("Impressions of
Charleston”); New York Tribune, June 2,
1865; New Era, Feb. 24,1870 (J. W. Alvord).

60. A. L. Etheridge to William T.
Briggs, June 7,1864, Edwin S. Williams to S.

5. Jocelyn, April 26, 1863, American Mis¬
sionary Assn. Archives; Forten, Journal,
131.

61. Sarah J. Foster to E. P. Smith, Jan.
3,1868, W. L. Coan to George Whipple, Oct.

6, 1864, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; Reid, After the War, 249-50; Botume,
First Days Amongst the Contrabands, 257;
New York Tribune, Dec. 2,1865.

62. National Freedman, TL (April

1866) , 115 (Chloe Merrick); American Freed¬
man, III (May 1868), 412.

63. Mary E. Burdick to George Whip¬
ple, March 8, 1864, American Missionary
Assn. Archives. On comparisons of white
and black students and the aptness of blacks
for various fields of study, see Josiah Beards¬
ley, Feb. 15,1865 (Ms. apparently intended
for publication in The American Mission¬
ary), G. H. Hyde to W. E. Whiting, Feb. 26,
1862, William G. Kephart to Lewis Tappan,
May 9, 1864, John Silsby to Rev. George
Whipple, Sept. 14, 1866, Elliot Whipple to
Rev. E. P. Smith, June 17,1867, American

Missionary Assn. Archives; National Freed¬
man, I (April 1, 1865), 92, (July 15, 1865),
191-92, (Aug. 15, 1865), 217; Extracts from
Letters of Teachers and Superintendents of
the New England Educational Commission
for Freedmen (4th series, Jan. 1,1864), 3, 7,
9; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Com¬
mittee on Reconstruction, Part II, 91, 256;
Dennett, The South As It Is, 207; Trow¬
bridge, The South, 337; Reid, After the War,
255; Macrae, Americans at Home, 342-45;
New York Times, Aug. 6,17,1865; New York
Tribune, July 7, 1865. On comparisons of
black and mulatto students, see Loyal Geor¬
gian, March 17,1866; National Freedman, I
(Aug. 15,1865), 218; Nordhoff, Freedmen of
South Carolina, 9.

64. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 107-09; National Freedman, I
(Sept. 15, 1865), 251; Christian Recorder,
July 1, 1865; Reid, After the War, 15-17,
246-53; Dennett, The South As It Is, 206-08,
211, 304.

65. Freedom’s Journal, June 1, 1827;
Frank H. Green to Rev. George Whipple,
Aug. 12, 1864, American Missionary Assn.
Archives; Christian Recorder, May 6, 1865
(J. C. Gibbs).

66. Rev. W. T. Richardson to Mrs. E. A.
Lane, April 29,1865, American Missionary
Assn. Archives; Christian Recorder, July 8,
1865 (G.N.Y.).

67. Asa B. Whitfield to Julia A. Shear-
mam, April 17, 1867, American Missionary
Assn. Archives.

68. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
247; Moore (ed.), The Juhl Letters (Sept. 18,
1866), 120.

69. Richardson, Negro in the Recon¬
struction of Florida, 100; N. A. McLean to
Rev. S. S. Ashley, Feb. 20, 1866, American
Missionary Assn. Archives; J. W. Alvord,
Eighth Semi-Annual Report on Schools for
Freedmen, July 1, 1869, 54. See also John
Silsby to Rev. George Whipple, Sept. 14,
1866, American Missionary Assn. Archives;
National Freedman, I (Nov. 15, 1865), 316
(B. W. Pond).

70. Botume, First Days Amongst the
Contrabands, 4; [Prof. Bennett Puryear],
The Public School in Its Relation to the Ne¬
gro (Richmond, 1877), 11. See also 39 Cong.,

Notes to pages 487-92

617

1 Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 2, "Report of Carl
Schurz,” 25; Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails,
226-27.

71. Nolen, Negro's Image in the South,
127-28.

72. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
55, 86, 143, 183, 252; B. F. Whittemore to
Bvt. Maj. H. W. Smith, Dec. 30, 1865,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina (Letters Received), Freed-
men’s Bureau; D. C. Jencks to Rev. Samuel
Hunt, Dec. 21, 1865, American Missionary
Assn. Archives.

73. D. T. Allen to Rev. C. H. Fowler,
Jan. 1,1864, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; Amos McCollough et al. to Gen. O. O.
Howard, May 6,1866, Charles F. Mayerhoff
to Col. Samuel Thomas, April 2,1866, R. F.
Campbell to Col. Samuel Thomas, April 5,
1866, Records of the Assistant Commission¬
ers, North Carolina and Mississippi (Letters
Received), Freedmen’s Bureau. On native
white reaction to black schools and the re¬
ception accorded teachers of freedmen, see
also John P. Bardwell to George Whipple,
April 28, May 4, 1866, William L. Clark to
Rev. E. P. Smith, Nov. 19,1867, Rev. George
W. Honey to Rev. M. E. Strieby, Feb. 21,
1866, Addie Warren to John P. Bardwell,
May 6, 1866, American Missionary Assn.
Archives; National Freedman, I (Nov. 15,

1865) , 324 (M. Anderson), (Dec. 15,1865), 347
(A. B. Corliss), 360 (W. J. Albert), H (May

1866) , 149; American Freedman, HI (June
1868), 427; Waterbury, Seven Years Among
the Freedmen, 19; Office of the Board of Edu¬
cation for Freedmen, Dept, of the Gulf, Re¬
port (Feb. 28, 1865), 8-9; Trowbridge, The
South, 188,228,490; Loyal Georgian, May 9,
1867; Swint, Northern Teacher in the South,
94-142.

74. Christian Recorder, June 16,1866;
New Orleans Tribune, Dec. 29,1865, Sept. 5,
1866; John P. Bardwell to George Whipple,
April 28,1866, American Missionary Assn.
Archives; National Freedman, I (Nov. 15,
1865), 328 (C. Kennedy).

75. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Part II,
253; Towne, Letters and Diary, 178. See also
J. W. Alvord, Eighth Semi-Annual Report on
Schools for Freedmen, July 1, 1869, 23;

Loyal Georgian, July 6, 1867 (G. L. Eber-
hart); New York Tribune, Dec. 2, 1865.

76. Sallie Coit to Emily, April 15,1868,
William N. Tillinghast Papers, Duke Univ.;
A. W. Moore to E. H. Dabbs, April 30,1870,

A. L. Burt Papers, Duke Univ.

77. Reid, After the War, 152; Botume,
First Days Amongst the Contrabands, 257-
58. For examples of racial mixing in the
freedmen’s schools, see Rev. Fisk P. Brewer
to Rev. George Whipple, Nov. 8, 1866 Cl
would not have it made too public till we can
show more decided results”), American Mis¬
sionary Assn. Archives; American Freed¬
man, I (June 1866), 43 (F. P. Brewer), 44 (E.

B. Adams), (July 1866), 80; Swint (ed.). Dear
Ones at Home, 204; Richardson, Negro in the
Reconstruction of Florida, 108-09. On the
fate of the "experiment” in Raleigh, see Fisk
P. Brewer to George Whipple, Feb. 6,1867,
American Missionary Assn. Archives.

78. American Freedman, I (April
1866), 5-6, (May 1866), 23-24; H. S. Beals to
Rev. E. P. Smith, Feb. 15, 1867, Rev. S. J.
Whiton to Rev. E. P. Smith, Feb. 16, 1867,
Rev. S. J. Whiton to Rev. George Whipple,
Feb. 28,1867, Rev. S. J. Whiton to Rev. E. P.
Smith, March 4,1867, John Scott to Rev. E.
P. Smith, March 6,1867, Hyman Thompson
to Rev. George Whipple, March 1867,
American Missionary Assn. Archives.

79. New York Times, Dec. 15, 1867.

80. New Orleans Tribune, April 26,
1867, Jan. 22,1869. See also ibid., Feb. 17,
23,1865, July 24, Oct. 24,29,1867; William
T. Nicholls to "Cousin Tom,” Col. W. W.
Pugh Papers, Louisiana State Univ.; J. W.
Alvord, Tenth Semi-Annual Report on
Schools for Freedmen, July 1, 1870, 48.

81. Avary, Dixie after the War, 312;
Mary to Missouria Stokes, June 1868, Mis-
souria Stokes Papers, Duke Univ.; Miss. S.
W. Stansbury to Rev. E. P. Smith, May 21,
1867, American Missionary Assn. Archives.

82. G. L. Eberhart to Rev. Samuel
Hunt, May 23, June 4,1866, American Mis¬
sionary Assn. Archives. See also J. E. Bryant
to Rev. George Whipple, June 12,1866, Da¬
vis Tillson to Rev. Whipple, July 4,1866.

83. American Freedman, I (Nov. 1866),
114 (editorial); Martha L. Kellogg to Rev.
George Whipple, Dec. 17, 1866, American
Missionary Assn. Archives.

618

Notes to pages 492-500

84. On the question of racial mixing in
the abolitionist movement, see, e.g., Leon F.
Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the
Free States , 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), 216-
23.

85. Lewis Tappan, Caste: A Letter to a
Teacher Among the Freedmen (New York
[1867]), 9; Christian Recorder ; Jan. 7,1865.

86. Christian Recorder ; April 23,1864,
June 29, 1867, Jan. 7, 1865. See also the
sources cited in note 24.

87. New York Times, Dec. 8, 1861;
WPA, Negro in Virginia, 263.

88. Forten, Journal, 133; Virginia C.
Green to A. W. Preston, Oct. 24, 1866,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
Mississippi (Letters Received), Freedmen’s
Bureau. See also Jonathan J. Wright to Rev.
Samuel Hunt, Feb. 5,1866, T. G. Steward to
John A. Rockwell, Nov. 6, 1867, American
Missionary Assn. Archives.

89. Francis L. Cardozo to Rev. George
Whipple, July 5,1865, Cardozo to Rev. M. E.
Strieby, Aug. 13,1866, Cardozo to Rev. Sam¬
uel Hunt, Dec. 2,1865, Jan. 13 [1866]. On the
progress of his school, see Cardozo to Hunt,
Oct. 10, Nov. 7,22, Dec. 2,15,1865, Cardozo
to Whipple, Oct. 21, 1865, Jan. 27, 1866,
American Missionary Assn. Archives.

90. Francis L. Cardozo, School Report
for November 1867, Sarah W. Stansbury to
E. P. Smith, Jan. 30,1867, Cardozo to E. P.
Smith, Dec. 24,1866, Jane A. Van Allen to
E. P. Smith, Feb. 16,1867, Cardozo to E. P.
Smith, April 9,1867, American Missionary
Assn. Archives. For visits to Cardozo’s
school, see Dennett, The South As It Is, 217-
18; Macrae, Americans at Home, 266-69;
Cardozo to Rev. Samuel Hunt, March 10,
1866, Jonathan J. Wright to Hunt, Dec. 4,
1865, American Missionary Assn. Archives.

91. Francis L. Cardozo to Rev. George
Whipple, Oct. 21, 1865, Cardozo to E. P.
Smith, Nov. 4, 1867, American Missionary
Assn. Archives. On his preparations for the
constitutional convention and the prospect
of his candidacy for secretary of state of
South Carolina, see Cardozo to E. P. Smith,
Dec. 7,1867, Jan. 2, March 9, 1868, Ameri¬
can Missionary Assn. Archives.

92. C. W. Buckley to Rev. George
Whipple, March 13,1866, G. L. Eberhart to
Ira Pettibone, Oct. 19,1866, American Mis¬
sionary Assn. Archives. On the preference

for black teachers in the "interior,” see
J. W. Alvord, Seventh Semi-Annual Report
on Schools for Freedmen, January 1, 1869,
24.

93. S. S. Ashley to Rev. Samuel Hunt,
Jan. 22, 1866, American Missionary Assn.
Archives. On the preference for white teach¬
ers, see also American Freedman, I (Oct.
1866), 106 (W. D. Newsome); Reid, After the
War, 511. On the objections of free-born
"colored people” to "a teacher bom in bond¬
age, unless of a very light complexion,” see
J. W. Alvord, Ninth Semi-Annual Report on
Schools for Freedmen, January 1, 1870, 15-
16.

94. Blanche Harris to Rev. George
Whipple, Jan. 23, March 10, 1866, John P.
Bardwell to Whipple, March 20, April 2,
1866, Rev. Palmer Litts to Whipple, April
27,1866, Addie Warren to John P. Bardwell,
May 6,1866, John P. Bardwell to Rev: Sam¬
uel Hunt, June 22,1866, Mary Still to Hunt,
Feb. 19, 1866, American Missionary Assn.
Archives.

95. Christian Recorder, Sept. 8, 1866
(T.W.C.); Blanche Harris to Rev. George
Whipple, March 10, 1866, American Mis¬
sionary Assn. Archives.

96. Christian Recorder, Dec. 2, 1865
("Editorial Correspondence”).

97. Washington, Up from Slavery, 28;
John P. Bardwell to Rev. M. E. Strieby, Nov.

20, 1865, American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; New York Times, June 22,1866, Aug.

21, 1863. On black support of schools and
teachers and independent educational
efforts, see also, eg., B. F. Randolph to Bvt.
Maj. Gen. R. K. Scott, March 15, 1867,
Records of the Assistant Commissioners,
South Carolina (Letters Received), Freed¬
men’s Bureau; De Forest, Union Officer in
the Reconstruction, 118-21; Trowbridge,
The South, 228, 251; 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Re¬
port of the Joint Committee on Reconstruc¬
tion, Part II, 251,254,256,257; Blassingame
(ed.), Slave Testimony, 386; Loyal Georgian,
July 6, 1867; New York Times, Sept. 2, 10,
1865.

98. Christian Recorder, Jan. 21, 1865
(J. Lynch); W. T. Richardson to Rev. M. E.
Strieby, Jan. 2, 1865, Richardson to Rev.
George Whipple, Jan. 10, 1865, Rev. S. W.
Magill to Whipple, Feb. 3, 6, 26, 1865,
American Missionary Assn. Archives.

Notes to pages 500-13

619

99. Christian Recorder ; Aug. 27,1864 pie, Sept. 29, 1865, American Missionary

(“Junius”). Assn. Archives.

100. T. K. Noble to Rev. George Whip-

Chapter Ten: Becoming a People

1. A. H. Haines to President Andrew
Johnson, Oct. 19,1865, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, South Carolina (Let¬
ters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau.

2. Christian Recorder, Jan. 20, 1866.

3. Discussion of the Freedmen’s Con¬
vention of North Carolina and the political
activity among blacks which preceded and
immediately followed it is based on Conven¬
tion of the Freedmen of North Carolina: Offi¬
cial Proceedings [Raleigh, 1865]; Christian
Recorder, Oct. 28,1865 (same as official pro¬
ceedings, except for additional speech by
James Harris; also includes a report of a
mass meeting in Edgecombe Co.); National
Freedman, 1 (Oct. 15, 1865), 289, 301-02;
New York Times, May 19 and Sept. 17 (New
Bern), Oct. 7 and 9 (state conv), 1865; New
York Tribune, Oct. 7 (state conv.), 24 (Edge¬
combe Co.), 1865; New Orleans Tribune,
Sept. 24 (Robeson Co., N.C.), Oct. 19 (Wil¬
mington), 1865; Dennett, The South As It Is,
148-54, 156, 175-77; Andrews, The South
since the War, 119-31,162,188; Evans, Bal¬
lots and Fence Rails, 87-93, 110-12; Perrin
Busbee to Benjamin S. Hedrick, Jan. 8,1866,
B. S. Hedrick Papers, Duke Univ.; James H.
Harris Papers, 1850 to 1873, State Dept, of
Archives and History, Raleigh, N.C.; Pro¬
ceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the
National Equal Rights League, Held in
Cleveland, Ohio, October 19,20, and 21,1865
(Philadelphia, 1865), 4.

4. New York Times, Oct. 11,1866; New
Orleans Tribune, Oct. 27, 1866.

5. Christian Recorder, Oct. 28, 1865;
Rogers, Thomas County, 1865-1900, 8, 13.

6. Andrews, The South since the War,
131, 188; Dennett, The South As It Is, 149,
175; New York Times, Oct. 24,1865, Nov. 19,
1866; Proceedings of the Convention of the
Colored People of Virginia, Held in the City
of Alexandria, Aug. 2, 3, 4, 5, 1865 (Alex¬
andria, 1865), 4, 11.

7. New Orleans Tribune, Jan. 15,1865.

8. Christian Recorder, April 21, 1866.

9. See, e.g., Loyal Georgian, July 6,
1867 (H. M. Turner); Christian Recorder,
Sept. 30 (R. H. Cain), Nov. 25 (T. G. Camp¬
bell), 1865, April 21,1866 (R. H. Cain), May
4 (J. J. Wright), 11 (H. M. Turner), Aug. 17
(H. M. Turner), Oct. 12 (M. R. Delany), 1867,
Feb. 1, 1868 (H. M. Turner), June 26, 1869
(M. R. Delany); Cardozo to Rev. George
Whipple, Oct. 21,1865, Cardozo to Rev. E. P.
Smith, Nov. 4,1867, March 9,1868, Wright
to Rev. Samuel Hunt, Dec. 4, 1865, Ameri¬
can Missionary Assn. Archives; T. G. Camp¬
bell, Sufferings of the Rev. T. G. Campbell
and His Family, in Georgia (Washington,
D.C., 1877); H. M. Turner, “Speech on the
Eligibility of Colored Members to Seats in
the Georgia Legislature ... September 3d,
1868,” in George A, Singleton, The Romance
of African Methodism: A Study of the Afri¬
can Methodist Episcopal Church (New
York, 1952), Appendix B, 1-16.

10. Williamson, After Slavery, 26-30;
Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment,
57-58.

11. Dennett, The South As It Is, 150;
Andrews, The South since the War, 123,131.

12. Dennett, The South As It Is, ISO-
51; New Orleans Tribune, May 7,1867 (Let¬
ter from Mobile); “Proceedings of the State
Convention of the Colored People of Ten¬
nessee,” in Colored Tennessean, Aug. 12,
1865.

13. Convention of the Colored People of
Virginia (Aug. 1865), 10; New Orleans Tri¬
bune, March 15,1865. For Horace Greeley’s
message, see Convention of the Freedmen of
North Carolina (Sept.-Oct. 1865), 9-11.

14. Proceedings of the Freedmen’s Con¬
vention of Georgia, Assembled at Augusta,
January 10th, 1866 (Augusta, 1866), 21, 23;
New Orleans Tribune, July 18,1865 (Letter
from Mobile).

15. New Orleans Tribune, Jan. 20,
Feb. 1,1865. Similar editorial advice may be
found in the issues of March 7, April 25,
1865, May 1, 19, June 12, 1867.

620

Notes to pages 513-20

16. Dennett, The South As It Is, 152-
53; J. W. Alvord, Seventh Semi-Annual Re¬
port on Schools for Freedmen, January 1,
1869, 50.

17. On free-born "colored society,” see
Berlin, Slaves Without Masters; Marina
Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The
Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina
(Columbia, S.C., 1973); Constance McLaugh¬
lin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race
Relations in the Nation's Capital (Prince¬
ton, 1967); and Blassingame, Black New Or¬
leans.

18. Bruce, The New Man, 79; W. L. Til-
den, Washington, D.C., Feb. 12, 1866 (Ms.
report), American Missionary Assn. Ar¬
chives; John E. Bruce, Washington’s Colored
Society (n.p., 1877; typewritten copy in
Schomburg Collection, New York Public Li¬
brary).

19. Williamson, After Slavery, 314.
For an examination of "colored society,” as
"moulded by outside forces,” see Rev. T. G.
Steward, "Colored Society,” Christian
Recorder, Nov. 9, 16, 23, Dec. 14, 28, 1876,
Jan. 11,18,1877.

20. New Orleans Tribune, Feb. 19,
1869. For similar sentiments, see the issues
of Dec. 6, 29,1864, March 28, June 30,1865.
But for the persistence of divisiveness, see,
eg., Semi-Weekly Louisianian, May 25,
1871.

21. Christian Recorder, April 21,1866.

22. New York Tribune, Nov. 29, 1865
(Convention of Colored People, South
Carolina).

23. Freedmen's Convention of Georgia
(Jan. 1866), 19. See also Convention of the
Freedmen of North Carolina (Sept.-Oct.
1865), 14.

24. Colored American, Jan. 6, 1866.
See also New York Tribune, Nov. 29, 1865
(Convention of Colored People, South
Carolina); Freedmen's Convention of Georgia
(Jan. 1866), 18.

25. Convention of the Freedmen of
North Carolina (Sept.-Oct. 1865), 13; Con¬
vention of the Colored People of Virginia
(Aug. 1865), 9.

26. National Freedman, I (Dec. 15,
1865), 364 (Convention of Colored People,
Alabama); New Orleans Tribune, Sept. 24,
1865 (Address of Freedmen of Robeson Co.,
N.C.); Freedmen 's Convention of Georgia

(Jan. 1866), 19. More than a hundred years
later, at the peak of the civil rights struggle
in the South, Malcolm X would make a simi¬
lar pronouncement on the limits of black
forbearance: "It's simply not possible to love
a man whose chief purpose in life is to hu¬
miliate you, and still be what is considered
a normal human being.”

27. Colored Tennessean, March 31,
1866 (Kentucky Colored People’s Conven¬
tion); New York Tribune, Nov. 29,1865 (Con¬
vention of Colored People, South Carolina);
Convention of the Colored People of Virginia
(Aug. 1865), 9,21; Proceedings of the Conven¬
tion of Colored Citizens of the State of Ar¬
kansas Held in Little Rock ... Nov. 30, Dec.
land 2 (Helena, 1866), 3-4.

28. Convention of the Freedmen of
North Carolina (Sept.-Oct. 1865), 13; Col¬
ored Tennessean, March 31,1866 (Kentucky
Colored People’s Convention); Convention of
the Colored People of Virginia (Aug. 1865),
9, 10, 12.

29. Montgomery, "Alabama Freed¬
men: Some Reconstruction Documents,”
248; New York Times, Nov. 12,1865 (Selma,
Ala.).

30. New York Times, June 20, 1866;
American Freedman, I (Sept. 1866), 87
(Georgia Equal Rights Assn, meeting); Pro¬
ceedings of the Convention of the Equal
Rights and Educational Association of
Georgia, Assembled at Macon, October 29th,
1866 (Augusta, 1866), 17; S. W. Laidler to
Thaddeus Stevens, May 7,1866, Stevens Pa¬
pers, Library of Congress (New Bern freed-
men’s meeting). Praise for the work of the
Freedmen’s Bureau was voiced by conven¬
tions in Alabama (1865), Georgia (1866),
Kentucky (1867), North Carolina (1865),
South Carolina (1865), Tennessee (1865), and
Virginia (1865).

31. [State Exec. Comm, for Equal Po¬
litical Rights in Missouri], An Address by the
Colored People of Missouri to the Friends of
Equal Rights (St. Louis, 1865), 3; South
Carolina Leader, Nov. 25,1865 (Convention
of Colored People); "Our Wrongs and
Rights,” Convention of the Colored People of
Virginia (Aug. 1865), 12-13.

32. American Freedman, I (Sept.
1866), 87-88 (Georgia Equal Rights Assn,
meeting); Freedmen's Convention of Georgia
(Jan. 1866), 16-17; Proceedings of the State

Notes to pages 521-25

621

Convention of Colored Men, Held at Lexing¬
ton, Kentucky, in the A.M.E. Church, No¬
vember 26th, 27th, and 28th, 1867

(Frankfort, 1867), 5-6; Convention of the Col¬
ored People of Virginia (Aug. 1865), 12.

33. Colored Tennessean, Aug. 12,1865
(Convention of the Colored People); New
York Tribune, Nov. 29,1865 (Convention of
Colored People, South Carolina).

34. Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia
(Jan. 1866), 30. The address drawn up by the
freedmen of North Carolina to the Constitu¬
tional Convention did complain of "un¬
scrupulous and avaricious employers” who
expelled blacks from the plantations and re¬
fused adequate compensation (Convention of
the Freedmen of North Carolina, Sept.-Oct.
1865), and Tennessee and Georgia blacks de¬
manded "just compensation” for labor per¬
formed (Colored Tennessean, Aug. 12,1865;
Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia, Jan.
1866, 29).

35. National Freedman, I (Dec. 15,
1865), 364 (Convention of Colored People,
Alabama); Freedmen’s Convention of
Georgia (Jan. 1866), 30; St Landry Progress
(Opelousas, La.), Sept. 7, 1867. For opposi¬
tion to confiscation, see also New Orleans
Tribune, June 12,1867 (Radical Republican
convention, Louisiana, June 1867), and New
York Times, May 26,1867 (James Harris of
N.C.). The Alabama convention of 1867
called for the confiscation of property of em¬
ployers who discharged blacks for exercising
their civil rights (New Orleans Tribune, May
4,1867), and Beverly Nash, a South Carolina
black leader, thought the confiscation ques¬
tion should be settled by Congress and "we
should make no expression of opinion about
it” (New York Times, Aug. 9,1867). For pro¬
confiscation sentiment, see New Orleans Tri¬
bune, Sept. 10, 24, 1864, April 19, May 6,
1865, and New National Era, Jan. 26,1871.

36. See, e.g., Montgomery, "Alabama
Freedmen: Some Reconstruction Docu¬
ments,” 247, 249 (Colored People’s Conven¬
tion, 1865); New York Tribune, Dec. 30,1865
(Colored Convention of Maryland); Colored
Tennessean, March 31,1866 (Kentucky Col¬
ored People’s Convention); Freedmen’s Con¬
vention of Georgia (Jan. 1866), 30.

37. Christian Recorder. Feb. 3, 1866.
For similar sentiments, see, e.g., Christian
Recorder, April 8 ("What Shall We Do to Be

Respected?”), Aug. 26 (Charleston Corr.),
Sept. 30 (H. H. Garnet), Dec. 9,16,23 (Advice
to Freedmen), 1865; March 10 ("Trying Mo¬
ment”), 17 ("The Jew and the Black Gen¬
tile”), 24 (Emigration), April 21 (S.C. Corr.),
May 19 ("Get Land”), Aug. 18 ("Colored Con¬
ventions”), 25 (J. M. Langston), Sept. 22
("Our Great Need”), 1866; Sept. 14 (J. M.
Langston), Nov. 30 ("Self-Reliance the Key
to Success”), 1867; Colored American, Jan.
6, 1866; Black Republican, April 15, 1865;
Free Man’s Press, Aug. 1 ("Learn a Trade”),
Sept. 5, 1868.

38. Address by the Colored People of
Missouri, 3; Colored Tennessean, March 31,
1866 (Kentucky Colored People’s Conven¬
tion); Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia
(Jan. 1866), 29-30; Christian Recorder, Feb.
24, 1866 (H. M. Turner); Convention of Col¬
ored Men, Kentucky (Nov. 1867), 7. On equal
access to public facilities, see, e.g., the
Georgia (Jan. and Oct. 1866) and Kentucky
(1867) conventions.

39. Convention of Colored Men, Ken¬
tucky (Nov. 1867), 8-9; Convention of the
Freedmen of North Carolina (Sept.-Oct.
1865), 5; Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia
(Jan. 1866), 19-20, 29.

40. Convention of the Colored People of
Virginia (Aug. 1865), 11; New Orleans Tri¬
bune, May 30, 1865 (Memorial of the Col¬
ored Men of Mississippi); Montgomery,
"Alabama Freedmen: Some Reconstruction
Documents,” 248,249 (Colored People’s Con¬
vention, 1865).

41. Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia
(Jan. 1866), 29; New Orleans Tribune, May
30, 1865 (Memorial of the Colored Men of
Mississippi); Colored Tennessean, Aug. 12,
1865 (Convention of the Colored People);
Convention of the Colored People of Virginia
(Aug. 1865), 20; S. W. Laidler to Thaddeus
Stevens, May 7, 1866, Stevens Papers, Li¬
brary of Congress (New Bern freedmen’s
meeting); Convention of Colored Men, Ken¬
tucky (Nov. 1867), 7; New York Tribune,
Nov. 29,1865 (Convention of Colored People,
South Carolina).

42. New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 9,
1864, April 6, 1865. See also the issues of
Jan. 3, April 28, and July 23, 1865.

43. Ibid., Jan. 14,15, Feb. 5, 9,14,18,
19,1865.

44. Convention of the Colored People of

622

Notes to pages 526-34

Virginia (Aug. 1865), 21; New Orleans Tri¬
bune, March 25, May 28,1865.

45. New Orleans Tribune, April 19,
1865. See also the issue of Nov. 25, 1866,
which urged the election of "colored” judges
and legislators. "But we want to fight that
political contest squarely and fairly, under
the banner of suffrage to all, and not by at¬
tempting the impracticable and impossible
work of suppressing the minority.”

46. Ibid., June 4,1865.

47. Black Republican, April 22,1865;
New Orleans Tribune, April 20, 1865; Pro¬
ceedings of the Forty-eighth Annual Session
of the Baltimore Conference of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church, April 13th,
1865 (Baltimore, 1865), 8; Christian Re¬
corder, April 22, 1865. See also Christian
Recorder, June 3, 1865 (S.C. Conference),
May 5,1865 (J. C. Brock).

48. Towne, Letters and Diary, 159-60,
162; Black Republican, April 22,1865.

49. New York Times, May 13, 1865;
Pearson (ed.), Letters from Port Royal, 310-
11; Botume, First Days Amongst the Contra¬
bands, 173-75, 178; Harriet B. Greeley to
Rev. George Whipple, April 29,1865, Ameri¬
can Missionary Assn. Archives; Black Re¬
publican, April 29,1865.

50. New Orleans Tribune, April 22,28,
21,1865; Proceedings ofthe Forty-eighth Ses¬
sion of the Baltimore Conf of the AME
Church, April 13, 1865, 9-10.

51. Martin Abbott, "Freedom’s Cry:
Negroes and Their Meetings in South
Carolina, 1866-1869,” Phylon, XX (Fall
1959), 264 (Charleston Mutual Aid Society);
New Orleans Tribune, May 2, 6, April 22,
July 27, 1865; Black Republican, April 22,
1865.

52. Towne, Letters and Diary, 167.

53. New Orleans Tribune, July 27, 30,
Aug. 3, Sept. 9, Oct. 27, Dec. 9, 30,1865. For
a more hopeful view of Johnson, see South
Carolina Leader, Oct. 21, Dec. 9,1865.

54. McPherson, The Political History
of the United States of America During the
Period of Reconstruction, 52-55; LaWanda
and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, & Prej¬
udice, 1865-66 (Glencoe, Ill., 1963), 163. For
black response to the interview, see New
York Times, Feb. 9, 1866; Christian
Recorder, Feb. 17, 1866.

55. Christian Recorder, March 3,

April 14, Sept. 8, 1866; Loyal Georgian,
March 3, 1866. For black disillusionment
with Johnson, see also New Orleans Tribune,
Sept. 11,15, 1866; Christian Recorder, Jan.
19, March 9, 1867; Loyal Georgian, March
17, Oct. 13, 1866.

56. Convention ofthe Colored People of
Virginia (Aug. 1865), 21.

57. Reid, After the War, 52. For the
"taxation without representation is tyr¬
anny” argument, see Convention of Colored
Citizens of Arkansas (1866), 6; Freedmen’s
Convention of Georgia (Jan. 1866), 18; Con¬
vention of Colored Men, Kentucky (Nov.
1867), 7; Christian Recorder, Oct. 28, 1865
(Edgecombe, Co., N.C.); New York Times,
Oct. 11, 1866 (Convention of Freedmen,
North Carolina); New York Tribune, Nov.
29, 1865 (Convention of Colored People,
South Carolina); Loyal Georgian, Oct. 13,
1866; New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 16, 1865;
Black Republican, April 29, 1865.

58. Address by the Colored People of
Missouri (1865); New York Times, Sept. 17,
1865 (A. H. Galloway at the Convention of
Freedmen, N.C.); The Union (New Orleans),
Dec. 1,1863 (P. B. S. Pinchback); Freedmen’s
Convention of Georgia (Jan. 1866), 29; Equal
Suffrage. Address from the Colored Citizens
of Norfolk, Virginia, to the People of the
United States (New Bedford, Mass., 1865);
Christian Recorder, Oct. 28, 1865 (Edge¬
combe Co., N.C.), May 19, 1866.

59. Christian Recorder, July 14, 1866;
Colored American, Jan. 13, 1866.

60. Herbert Aptheker, "South
Carolina Negro Conventions, 1865,” Journal
of Negro History, XXXI (1946), 94; Loyal
Georgian, Feb. 17, 1866; Colored Tennes¬
sean, Oct. 7, 1865; New Orleans Tribune,
Nov. 18, 1864, Dec. 15, 1866; Freedmen’s
Convention of Georgia (Jan. 1866), 19; Pro¬
ceedings ofthe Council ofthe Georgia Equal
Rights Association, Assembled at Augusta,
Ga., April 4th, 1866 (Augusta, 1866), 13;
New York Times, Sept. 17,1865 (A. H. Gallo¬
way at the Convention of Freedmen, N.C.);
Dennett, The South As It Is, 27.

61. New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 18,

1864.

62. Ibid, Aug. 1, 1865.

63. Convention ofthe Colored People of
Virginia (Aug. 1865), 21-22; Reid, After the
War, 144.

Notes to pages 534-48

623

64. Convention of the Colored People of
Virginia (Aug. 1865), 22.

65. New Orleans Tribune, Dec. 9, Nov.
18, 1864. See also the issue of May 4, 1865
("Fallacy of ‘Preparation* ”).

66. National Freedman, I (Aug. 15,
1865), 220; New York Times, June 4, 1865;
Equal Suffrage. Address from the Colored
Citizens of Norfolk, Va. (1865), 9-15.

67. On the “election” in Beaufort, see
The Mission of the United States Republic:
An Oration Delivered by Rev. James Lynch
... July 4, 1865 (Augusta, 1865), 10; on a
mayoralty election in Femandina, see Reid,
After the War, 160; on the registration and
voting in New Orleans, see New Orleans Tri¬
bune, June 17, 23, 24, 30, July 12, 21, 28,
Aug. 4,18, 22, Sept. 2, 10, 17, 19, Nov. 7, 8,
10, 15, 1865.

68. Blassingame, Black New Orleans,

1 - 22 .

69. New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 15, 16,

1864.

70. Ibid., Sept. 2, 26, 1865.

71. Christian Recorder, May 19,1866.

72. New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 11,
Oct. 23, 1866.

73. Colored Tennessean, Aug. 12,1865
(Convention of the Colored People); New
York Times, April 25, 1865 (Petition from
“the colored men of East Tennessee”). See
also New Orleans Tribune, April 4, July 25,

1865, Sept. 13, 1866.

74. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk,
3-4.

75. Christian Recorder, Aug. 25,1866.
See also “The Negro an Inferior Race,” in
ibid., Nov. 20, 1869 (D. A. Straker)

76. Ibid., Oct. 4, 1877 ("Race Charac¬
teristics”).

77. Ibid., Nov. 21, 1868 ("The Ameri¬
can Negro”).

78. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testi¬
mony, 381; Colored Tennessean, Aug. 12,
1865 (Convention of the Colored People);
Christian Recorder, Jan. 23, 1864 (H. M.
Turner); Weekly Louisianian, Dec. 7, 1878
(“Spell It with a Capital”). On objections to
“negro,” see also New Era, Aug. 18, 1870;
nevertheless, the editor of Weekly
Louisianian (Dec. 12, 1874) thought few if
any “intelligent colored citizens” objected to
the term, “though they very properly resent
the contemptuous one when spelt with two

gs.” On gradations of color, see New Orleans
Tribune, May 23,1865. For the debate over
whether to strike "African” from the name
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
see Christian Recorder, Nov. 21, Dec. 19,
1863, April 9, 1864, March 25, April 1, 8,
May 6,1865; New Orleans Tribune, June 9,
1865.

79. Loyal Georgian, April 10, 1867;
New Era, Feb. 3, 1870.

80. Christian Recorder, June 16,1866;
Semi-Weekly Louisianian, June 15,1871.

81. Semi-Weekly Louisianian, March
10,1872 (H. H. Garnet); Christian Recorder,
May 13, 1865.

82. Christian Recorder, March 25 (J.
Lynch), April 8 (G. Rue), 1865.

83. New Orleans Tribune, Aug. 13,
1865, Feb. 18, 1869; Evans, Ballots and
Fence Rails, 90; Christian Recorder, Nov.
27,1869.

84. Christian Recorder, June 30,1866,
Oct. 21, 1865.

85. New Orleans Tribune, April 13,
1867 (Savannah meeting); Christian
Recorder, Jan. 5, 1867; Josiah Gorgas, Ms.
Journal, entry for July 9, 1867, Univ. of
North Carolina.

86. William S. Basinger to George W.
J. DeRenne, Aug. 12,1867, DeRenne Papers,
Duke Univ.

87. Loyal Georgian, July 6, 1867.

88. B. F. Randolph to Bvt. Maj. Gen.
R. K. Scott, Aug. 6, 1867, Records of the
Assistant Commissioners, South Carolina
(Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bureau
(Randolph’s assassination was announced in
Christian Recorder, Oct. 31,1868); New Or¬
leans Tribune, May 12,1867. See also Loyal
Georgian, July 6, 1867 ("A Word on Regis¬
tration”).

89. New Orleans Tribune, May 24,
1867. On the demands voiced by black politi¬
cal rallies, see, e.g., Christian Recorder, May
4, 1867 (Beaufort, S.C.); New Orleans Tri¬
bune, May 4 (Mobile), 10 (St. Louis), 1867;
New York Times, Jan. 27 (Georgetown,
D.C.), March 19 (Savannah), 27 (Charleston),
April 2 (Savannah), 19 (Mobile), 24 (Peters¬
burg, Va.), May 4 (Mobile), 8 (Talladega,
Ala.), 9 (Jefferson Co., Fla.), 1867.

90. New York Times, Oct. 28, Aug. 9,
31, 1867.

91. Loyal Georgian, Aug. 10, 1867;

624

Notes to pages 549-54

New York Times, June 30, May 20, Sept. 25,
1867; Loyal Georgian, April 10, 1867. But
Thomas W. Stringer, a black political leader
in Mississippi, thought his people "more or
less mistrustful” of all the candidates,
"They know that there are but few south¬
erners that will do altogether right by them
in making the laws, and that northerners
with a few exceptions, that are eligible, are
no better.” Christian Recorder, May 11,

1867.

92. Towne, Letters and Diary, 182-83;
St Landry Progress, Nov. 16,1867.

93. New York Times, May 28, 1867;
Christian Recorder, Oct. 11, 1867 (M. R.
Delany); Free Press (Charleston), April 5,

1868. On black political aspirations, see also
Christian Recorder, Aug. 10 ("A Colored
Man for Vice-President of the United
States” and "Who Are Our Friends?”), Nov.
30 (J. C. Sampson), 1867; New York Times,
Aug. 6, 9, Oct. 22, 1867.

94. Christian Recorder, June 26,1869
(M. R. Delany); New Orleans Tribune, June
12, 13, 14, 18, June 25, 29, July 11, 12, 31,
1867.

95. New Orleans Tribune, May 17,
June 12, May 19, Dec. 24, June 9, April 21,
May 1, July 31, 1867.

96. Macon Telegraph, reprinted in St
Landry Progress, Oct. 5, 1867.

97. Edward Deane, Asst. Commis¬
sioner, Freedmen’s Bureau, Charleston,
S.C., to Headquarters, Sub-Asst. Commis¬
sioner, Darlington, S.C., Aug. 24,1867, with
a newspaper clipping on the Rev. Nick Wil¬
liams from Charleston Mercury, Aug. 24,
1867, instructions to investigate "the truth
of the statements contained therein,” and
an endorsement by the commanding officer
in Darlington that he had already dis¬
patched troops to arrest Williams. Records
of the Assistant Commissioners, South
Carolina (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau. The arrest is also reported in New
York Times, Sept. 9,1867.

98. F. W. Pickens to Adele Petigru All-
ston, Nov. 22,1867, in Easterby (ed.), South
Carolina Rice Plantation, 237; Josiah Gor¬
ges, Ms. Journal, entries for March 9, July
14, Aug. 25,1867, Univ. of North Carolina;
Abner S. Williams, Mayor of Williamston,
North Carolina, to Hon. Jonathan Worth,
Sept. 8, 1866, Lt. C. W. Dodge to Lt. Col.

Stephen Moore, Sept. 28, 1866, Records of
the Assistant Commissioners, North
Carolina (Letters Received), Freedmen’s Bu¬
reau. See H. S. Van Eaton to Bvt. Maj. Gen.
A. Gillem, Nov. 24,1867, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters
Received), Freedmen’s Bureau.

99. Loyal Georgian, Aug. 10, 1867;
John H. Bills, Ms. Diary, entries for July 16,
17, 29, 1867, Univ. of North Carolina; Ed¬
ward Barnwell Heyward to "Tat” [Cather¬
ine Maria Clinch Heyward], May 5, 1867,
Heyward Family Papers, Univ. of South
Carolina.

100. Lt. H. R. Williams to Lt. Merritt
Barber, Feb. 10,1868, Records of the Assis¬
tant Commissioners, Mississippi (Letters Re¬
ceived), Freedmen’s Bureau; New York
Times, Jan. 30, 1868 (Bureau circular, Al¬
bany, Ga.). For reports that the impending
elections had revived hopes among freed-
men of land redistribution, see Fisk P.
Brewer to Rev. George Whipple, May 27,
1867, American Missionary Assn. Archives;
Sarah M. Payne to Mary Clendenin, Dec. 14,
1867, Historical Society of Pennsylvania;
Robert Philip Howell, Ms. Memoirs, 24,
Univ. of North Carolina; Mrs. Mary Jones to
Mrs. Mary S. Mallard, May 15,1867, in My¬
ers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1382; New York
Times, May 18, June 14, July 23, Aug. 13,
Oct. 11, 1867, Feb. 28, 1868.

101. Ravenel, Private Journal, 306;
Theodore G. Barker to Benjamin Allston,
Oct. 10, 1867, in Easterby (ed.), South
Carolina Rice Plantation, 235; William
Heyward to James Gregorie, June 4, 1868,
Gregorie-Elliott Collection, Univ. of North
Carolina. The same suggestion was made in
a Macon newspaper, as quoted in New York
Times, Aug. 13, 1867.

102. Henry Middleton to Mr. and Mrs.
J. Francis Fisher, May 29,1867, Cadwalader
Collection (J. F. Fisher section), Historical
Society of Pennsylvania; W. E. B. Du Bois,
"Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” Ameri¬
can Historical Review, XV (1910), 795; Pur-
year, The Public School in Its Relation to the
Negro, 14.

103. Walter K. Steele to W. W. Lenoir,
Jan. 5,1868, Lenoir Papers, Univ. of North
Carolina; G. I. Crafts to William Porcher
Miles, April 13,1867, William P. Miles Col¬
lection, Univ. of North Carolina. Similar

Notes to pages 555-56

625

sentiments are expressed in John C, MacRae
to Donald MacRae, March 17,1867, MacRae
Papers, Duke Univ., and in Dr. Ethelred
Philips to Dr. James J. Philips, Dec. 1,1867,
James J. Philips Collection, Univ. of North
Carolina.

104. Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, as
quoted in New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 22,
1865; Free Press, April 11, 1868; New Or¬
leans Tribune, April 9, 17, 1867. For white
appeals to black voters, see also Jacob R.
Davis, "To the Colored Voters of the 18th
District of Georgia” [1868?], Joseph Belknap
Smith Papers, Duke Univ.; New York Times,
March 21, April 8, June 19, Aug. 25, 1867.
For black response to these appeals, see New
Orleans Tribune, April 9 ("The Enemy's
Plan”), Nov. 27, Dec. 14,21,1867; New York
Times, May 25, 1867.

105. New Orleans Tribune, Dec. 13,
1867; Paul L. De Clouet, Ms. Diary, entry for
Nov. 3, 1868, Alexandre E. De Clouet Pa¬
pers, Louisiana State Univ. For reports of
the activities of "conservative” blacks, see
New Orleans Tribune, April 9, Dec. 14,1867;
New York Times, April 2, 15, 21, Sept. 1,
Nov. 21, 22, 26, 1867. For black response,
including alleged threats of violence, see
"Conservative Negroes,” in Charles N.
Hunter scrapbook, Nov. 30, 1867, Duke
Univ.; J. N. Huske to "Dear Joe,” Aug. 17,
1868, William N. Tillinghast Papers, Duke
Univ.; New Orleans Tribune, April 13,1867;
New York Times, Oct. 23, 1867.

106. E. W. Demus to Capt. William C.
Sterling, April 24, 1867, Records of the As¬
sistant Commissioners, Louisiana (Letters
Received), Freedmen’s Bureau; George R.
Ghiselin to Dr. Thomas J. McKie, Nov. 2,
1868, T. J. McKie Papers, Duke Univ.; Jacob
Black, Chairman of Board of Registration,
Eufala, Ala., to Hon. Albert Griffin, Feb. 22,
1868, Thaddeus Stevens Papers, Library of
Congress. For reports of violence, intimida¬
tion, and economic coercion, see also Thad
K. Pruess, Oxford, Miss., to Maj. A. W. Pres¬
ton, July 31,1867, William E. Dove, George¬
town, S.C., to Bvt. Maj. H. C. Egbert, June 6,
1868, Lt. W. G. Sprague, Aberdeen, Miss., to
Maj. John Tyler, July 2, 1868, Emanuel
Handy [freedman candidate for the legisla¬
ture], Hazlehurst, Miss., to Gen. A. C. Gil-
lem, July 5, 1868, Records of the Assistant
Commissioners, Mississippi and South
Carolina (Letters Received), Freedmen's Bu¬
reau; A. Y. Sharpe to Mrs. Lucy M. Young,
Aug. 31, 1868, William D. Simpson Papers,
Univ. of North Carolina; Moore (ed.), The
Juhl Letters (May 7, 1867), 155-56; New
York Times, April 7, Oct. 3, Dec. 14, 20,
1867.

107. New York Times, Feb. 15, 1868
(Montgomery, Ala.). See also Christian
Recorder, Nov. 16,1867 (Norfolk); New York
Times, June 4 (Washington, D.C.), Aug. 2
(Knoxville and Memphis), Oct. 29 (Augusta
and Richmond), 30 (Macon and Savannah),
1867.

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[African Methodist Episcopal Church], Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Annual Session of the Baltimore
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1891

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Andrews, Sidney. The South Since the War: As Shoum by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in
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Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York, 1943.

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629

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————. ITU r OUUU) OJ inuon x win., vxii.xx.ugv/, - ~ ~ ~ ■ _

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Evans, W. McKee. Ballots and Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear. Chapel Hill, 1967.
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Lawrence Stone (ed.), The University in Society, 2 vols. Princeton, 1974.

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Selected Bibliography 631

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Morrow, Ralph E. Northern Methodism and Reconstruction. East Lansing, 1956.

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_. The War for the Union: The Organized War to Victory, 1864-1865. New York, 1971.

[New England Educational Commission for Freedmen]. Extracts from Letters of Teachers and Superin¬
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Nichols, George W. The Story of the Great March from the Diary of a Staff Officer. New York, 1865.
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Oliphant, Mary C., Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves (eds.). The Utters of William
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Osofsky, Gilbert (ed.). Puttin ’ On Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown,
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Pearson, Henry Greenleaf. The Life of John A. Andrew: Governor of Massachusetts, 1861—1865. 2 vols.
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[Puryear, Prof. Bennett]. The Public School in Its Relation to the Negro. By Civis. Richmond, 1877.
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Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment Indianapolis, 1964.

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Scarborough, William K. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South. Baton Rouge, 1966.

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[Simpson, Joseph]. Friends’ Central Committee for the Relief of the Emancipated Negroes,
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Sitterson, J. Carlyle. Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950. Lexington
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Steams, Charles. The Black Man of the South, and the Rebels; or, The Characteristics of the Former, and
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Stephenson, Gilbert T. Race Distinctions in American Law. New York, 1911.

Stevens, George T. Three Years in the Sixth Corps. Albany, 1866.

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Taylor, Alrutheus A. The Negro in Tennessee, 1865-1880. Washington, D.C., 1941.

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Taylor, Susie King. Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: With the 33d United States Colored Troops Late
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Thompson, Henry Yates. An Englishman in the American Civil War: The Diaries of Henry Yates Thomp¬
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Trowbridge J.T. The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated
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Freedmen. Washington, D. C., 1867.

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MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

Amistad Research Center, Dillard University, New Orleans

American Missionary Association Papers (This collection was consulted when still housed
in the Fisk University Library, Nashville, Tennessee.)

Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina

Andrews Papers Charles N. Hunter Scrapbook

Armisted L. Burt Papers MacRae Papers

Henry S. Clark Papers T. J. McKie Papers

Francis W. Dawson Papers McLaurin Papers

DeRenne Papers Joseph Belknap Smith Papers

Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers Missouria Stokes Papers

634

Selected Bibliography

Augustin L. Taveau Papers William N. Tillinghast Papers

Ella Gertrude (Clanton) Thomas Journal
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

American Negro Historical Society Papers, Jacob C. White, Jr., Papers
Cadwalader Collection, J. F. Fisher Section, Henry Middleton and Wife
Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, Carey Papers

Sarah P. Miller Payne, Letters to Mary Clendenin and Nancy Hartshome Clendenin Free¬
man, 1865-1872

Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery Papers
Howard University Library, Washington, D.C.

George L. Ruffin Papers

Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Brock Collection

Glazier Collection Main File

Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.

Thaddeus Stevens Papers Carter G. Woodson Collection

Louisiana State Department of Archives and History, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Henry Anderson Papers Gustave Lauve Papers

Pierre G. T. Beauregard Papers St.John R. Liddell and Family Papers

R. J. Causey Papers William N. Mercer Papers

Alexander E. De Clouet Papers Alexander F. Pugh and Family Papers

Emily Caroline Douglas Papers W. W. Pugh Papers

Christian D. Koch Papers Micajah Wilkinson Papers

National Archives, Washington, D. C.

Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau)

Records of the Assistant Commissioners (Letters Received)

Records of the Subordinate Field Offices
Registers of Letters Received
New York Public Library, New York

Shaw Family Papers

North Carolina State Department of Archives and History, Raleigh
James H. Harris Papers

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
John E. Bruce Papers

South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia
Manigauit Papers

South CaroUniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

Ball family Papers
John S. Bogert Papers
Bruce-Jones-Murchison Papers
Bonds Conway Papers
Deas Papers

Glover-North Family Papers
Southern Historical Collection, University of North
Samuel A. Agnew Diary
Avery Family Papers
Everard Green Baker Diaries
Bayside Plantation Records
Jesse and Overton Bernard Diaries
John Houston Bills Diary
Catherine Barbara Broun Diary
John Hamilton Cornish Diary
De Rosset Family Papers
Belle Edmondson Diary
Grace B. Elmore Diaries

Heyward Family Papers
Emma E. Holmes Diary
Miscellaneous Correspondence
Thomas J. Moore Papers
Dr. Edward Smith Tennent Papers
Williams-Chesnut-Manning Papers
Carolina, Chapel Hill

Josiah Gorgas Journal
Gregorie-Elliott Family Papers
Robert Philip Howell Memoirs
Kean-Prescott Family Papers
Lenoir Family Papers
William Gaston Lewis Papers
Mackay-Stiles Papers
Manigauit Plantation Records
William Porcher Miles Papers
Miscellaneous Correspondence
Thomas J. Myers Papers

Selected Bibliography

James J. Philips Collection
Quitman Papers
William D. Simpson Papers

George C. Taylor Collection
Trenholm Papers
James W. White, Papers

NEWSPAPERS

Anglo-African (New York)

Black Republican (New Orleans)
Bulletin (Louisville)

Christian Recorder (Philadelphia)
Colored American (Augusta, Ga.)
Colored Tennessean (Nashville)
Douglass ’ Monthly (Rochester)
Freedman’s Press (Austin, Texas)

Free Man's Press (Austin, Texas)

Free Press (Charleston, S.C.)
Louisianian (New Orleans)

Loyal Georgian (Augusta)

Missionary Record (Charleston, S.C.)

New Era (Washington, D.C.)

New National Era (Washington, D.C.)
New Orleans Tribune (New Orleans)
New York Times (New York)

New York Tribune (New York)

St. Landry Progress (Opelousas, La.)
Semi-Weekly Louisianian (New Orleans)
South Carolina Leader (Charleston)
Tennessean (Nashville)

The Union (New Orleans)

Weekly Louisianian (New Orleans)
Workingman’s Advocate (Chicago)

Index

abandoned plantations: leasing of, 376,

400-1; restored to owners, 404-7; seizure
of, 400; slaves on, 148
Abbeville District, S.C., 30
abolitionists: black views of, 378, 493; as
educators, 477-8; as employers, 346; as
recruiters, 77; on relations with blacks,
492-3; on slave morals, 230; in Union
Army, 131-2

Abraham (ex-slave), 338-9
Abram (ex-slave), 440
Adams, Louisa (ex-slave), 307
Adams, William (ex-slave), 24
address, terms of, 207, 252-5, 409, 430,

482, 488, 511; conflicts over, 252, 256-60
Adkins, Ida (ex-slave), 150
adultery, 11-12, 243
Africa: black ambivalence toward, 504,
539-41, 543-4; emigration to, 308
African Methodist Episcopal Church, 25,

67, 184, 279, 453, 502, 535, 539-40, 544;
advice to freedmen, 450; debate over
"African,” 540-1; on Lincoln, 528;
organization of freedmen into, 452,

455-6, 464, 466-8; in politics, 470-1, 549
African names, 250

Agnew, Rev. Samuel A., 143, 260, 427-8,
429, 431, 436-7
Akin, Mary F., 44

Alabama: political agitation in, 512,

516-17, 521, 523, 546, 555; recruitment
of black troops in, 74, 75; seek Chinese
labor for, 352; wages in, 411
Albany, Ga., 314
Alcorn, James, 156,175
Alexander, Robert (black preacher), 279
Allen, William, 147

Allston, Adele Petigru, 55-6, 122—3, 124,
141, 142, 146-7, 154, 157,160, 348, 431,
436, 444; reclaims plantations, 209-11
Allston, Elizabeth, 209-11
Allston, Robert F. W., 209
Allums, Cato (ex-slave), 284
Amelia County, Va., 299
American Colonization Society, 308
American Missionary Association, 464,

477, 489-90, 495, 499-500

Amite County, Miss., 48
amnesty, black views of: 200-1, 369, 524-7,
55!

Amnesty, Proclamation of, 404-5
Anderson, Andy (ex-slave), 13, 306-7

Anderson, Jourdon (ex-slave), 333—5
Anderson, Mary (Brodie) (ex-slave),
117-18, 325

Anderson, P. H., 333-5
Andrew, Gov. John A., 77, 80
Andrews, Eliza Frances, 117, 155, 157,
251, 258, 259-60, 268, 269, 274-5, 361,
427; performs domestic labor, 355—7
Andrews, Garnett, 274-5
Andrews, Sidney, 254, 276
apprenticeship laws, 191, 237-8, 365-6
Arch (ex-slave), 198
Arkansas: insurrectionary plot in, 47;
migration to, 308-9; political agitation
in, 518; recruitment of black troops in,
70; removal of slaves to, 32, 33; wages

in, 411

Armstrong, Mary (ex-slave), 237

army, see Confederate Army; Union Army

arson, 29, 46, 152

Askew, Gus (ex-slave), 121

Assumption Parish, La., 32

Athens, Ga., 24, 177

Atlanta, Ga., 280, 314

Attucks, Crispus, 532

Augusta, Ga., 179, 263, 293, 312, 314,

315-16, 475

ant Charity (slave), 109

ant Delia (ex-slave), 159

ant Nellie (ex-slave), 298

ant Phillis (ex-slave), 387

unt Polly (slave), 106

unt Sally (slave), 120

unt Sissy (slave), 217-18

luntie,” as a term of address, 124, 252

vary, Myrta Lockett, 191-2, 267, 469

Bacchus, Josephine (ex-slave), 359
Baker, Everard Green, 444
Baker, Henry (ex-slave), 8
Banks, Nathaniel P., 377, 378
Banner, Henry (ex-slave), 248-9
Baptist Church, 25, 456, 458-9, 467
Barber, Ed (ex-slave), 467
Barber, Millie (ex-slave), 235
Barbour, Charlie (ex-slave), 229
Barnwell, Martin (ex-slave), 242
Baton Rouge, La., 52,147, 314
Bayou Lafourche, La., 137
Bayou Plaquemine, La., 137
Beals, H. S., 489-90

638

Index

Beaufort, N.C., 489-90
Beaufort, S.C., 52, 69,140-1, 206, 312, 315,
389, 535; sacking of, 140-1
Beaver Bend plantation, Ala., 343
"Been in the Storm So Long,” vii
Belflowers, Jesse (overseer), 55, 56, 146-7,
160

Bell, Virginia (ex-slave), 328
Bennefield, Willis (ex-slave), 414
Berkeley, Armstead (black preacher), 25
Berkeley County, S.C., 50
Berry, Fannie (ex-slave), 36, 171-2
Best, Nat, 147
Bethiah (slave), 221-2
Betts, Ellen and Charity (ex-slaves), 330
Bexar County, Tex., 216-17
Bibb, Henry (ex-slave), 19
Bills, John H.: on slave restlessness and
work slowdowns, 109,116-17; on
defections and emancipation, 138,
139-40, 142,155, 436; ex-slaves of,
register to vote, 552
Black Codes, 366-71, 375, 408; blacks
protest, 369-70

Black Republican (New Orleans): advice
to freedmen, 403

black soldiers, see Confederate Army;

Union Army, blacks in
Blakely, Adeline (ex-slave), 328
Bobbitt, Henry (ex-slave), 311
body servants, 39-41
Bogert, Lt. Col. John S., 100
Boggs, Susan (ex-slave), 464
Boles, Elvira (ex-slave), 33
Bolivar County, Miss., 341, 375, 381
Bonner, John, 190
Bossier Parish, La., 47
Botume, Elizabeth, 478, 483
Boulware, Samuel, 201
Boykin, John Thomas, 190
Boynton, Rivana (ex-slave), 114
Bradford, Susan, 303
Bradley, Aaron, 441
Brady, Wes (ex-slave), 10
Brice, Andy (ex-slave), 124
BrinkerhofF, H. R., 323
Brodie, Mary (ex-slave), see Anderson,
Mary

Brooks, Charlotte (ex-slave, La.), 24
Brooks, Charlotte (ex-slave, Tex.), 181
Broun, Catherine, 108
Brown, Abram (slave driver), 109-10
Brown, Charlotte (ex-slave), 225
Brown, Fred (ex-slave), 306
Brown, John, 62, 68, 93, 504, 527
Brown, Sara (ex-slave), 214
Brown, William Wells: as freedman,
219-20; as recruiter, 77, 91-2; as slave,
159, 247

Brown Fellowship Society, 513
Bruce, John E. (ex-slave), 514
Bryant, Charley, 110-11

Burdick, Mary E., 483
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands, see Freedmen’s
Bureau

Burke County, Ga., 293, 294, 295, 414

Burkhead, Rev. L. S., 465-6

Bums, Susie (ex-slave), 56

Burrell, Savilla (ex-slave), 165-6

Burt, Armisted, 374-5

Butler, Benjamin F., 52, 68

Butler, Frances, see Leigh, Frances Butler

Caddy (slave), 186-7
Cain, Louis (ex-slave), 9
Cain, Richard H. (black minister): as AME
organizer, 453, 456, 457, 466-7, 468; on
education, 472; on new black leadership,
509; optimism of, 515; in politics, 471,
510; protests treatment of black POWs,
91; on white reformers, 493
Calloway, Walter (ex-slave), 122
Camden, S.C., 47, 96, 116,124,180
Camp Nelson, Ky., 51, 54
Campbell, Tunis G., 510
Canton, Miss., 487
Capers, William (overseer), 104-5
Cardozo, Francis L. (free Negro), 495-6,

510

Cardozo, Thomas W. (free Negro), 454, 458
carpetbaggers, 549
Carruthers, Richard (ex-slave), 216
Cashman, Jim (ex-slave), 202
Cato (ex-slave; soldier), 53
Chappel, Cecelia (ex-slave), 329
Charleston, S.C., 181, 246, 259, 288, 316,
318, 324, 430; black churches in, 456,
467, 471, 520; black schools in, 475,
495-6; free Negro elite in, 17, 315, 509,
513; insurrectionary rumors in, 47, 149;
liberation of, 96,121-2, 177-8; migration
to, 312, 313, 314; protests against
segregation, 263, 264; race riot, 280;
stevedores’ strike in, 441
Charlottesville, Va., 548
Chase, Lucy, 460
Chattanooga, Tenn., 27
Cheatam, Henry (ex-slave), 160
Cherokee County, Ala., 438
Cherry, Cpl. Jackson (black soldier), 336
Chesnut, Col. James, 42, 44
Chesnut, Mary, 22, 31, 36, 110, 255, 357;
on abolitionists, 476; on emancipation,
197; fears of slave violence, 60-2, 149;
on miscegenation, 265; on slave loyalty
and disaffection, 4, 15, 20, 53-4, 63,
151-2,154, 299, 325
Chester, T. Morris, 170
Chester County, S.C., 184
Chicora Wood plantation, S.C., 142, 146,
209, 210, 444
Child, Lydia Maria, 477
children: apprenticed, 191, 237-8, 366, 416;

Index

639

impact of emancipation on, 191, 229,

230-1, 233-4, 235-8

Chinese immigrants, 444; as replacements
for black laborers, 352, 547
Choctaw County, Miss., 147
Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, organ of
AME Church): on absence of slave
uprising in Civil War, 49; on black
soldiers, 67, 72, 77, 84; on need for
educated clergy, 459; on racial identity,
539

church, black, 312; black criticism of, 454,
467; in education, 471, 499; in politics,
470-1; in postwar South, 462-71; white
reaction to, 279, 468-70; see also
individual denominations; preachers,
religion

church, white: black exodus from, 464,
466-9; segregation in, 24, 465, 469
Cincinnati Enquirer , 223
cities and towns: abuse of freedmen in,
317-21; Black Codes in, 368; black labor
in, 177-8, 312-13, 321-2, 390, 441-2;
emancipation in, 169-70,177-8, 181,

259; freed slaves advised to avoid,

316-17, 381; movement of slaves to and
from, 310-16, 323-1, 381-2, 432; slave
depredations in, 140-1; slaves in, 29, 316
Civil Rights Bill (1866), 507, 525
Civil War: black troops in, 44-5, 64-103;
free Negro perceptions of, 17;
insurrectionary activity in, 46-8;
postwar black perceptions of, 48-9, 505,
516, 517-18; slave perceptions of, 5, 6, 8,
19-27, 41, 44-5, 51, 63, 106, 108,118; see
also Confederate Army; Confederate
States of America; Union Army
Claiborne County, Miss., petition of
freedmen of, 201, 369
Clarendon District, S.C., 303, 415
Clark, Walter, 44
Clarke County, Ala., 416
Clay, C. C., 145

Clemens, Harriet (ex-slave), 236
clergymen, see preachers
Coahoma County, Miss., 175, 437
Cobb, Gen. Howell, 43
Coggin, John (ex-slave), 326
Coit, Sallie, 488-9
Colbert, William (ex-slave), 165
Colburn, Dick, 304
Cole, Thomas (ex-slave), 216
colonization, 308, 366; black rejection of,
308,504,515-16

color: as source of divisiveness, 516-14;
and suffrage, 535-6; value placed on,
223-4, 541, 542, 542-3, 544
Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 468
Colquitt, Martha (ex-slave), 177
Colton, Marcia, 457-8, 477
Columbia, S.C., 181, 290, 467, 469-70
Columbia County, Ga., 346

compensation: for labor as slaves, 334,

392, 521; for loss of slaves, 392
Confederate Army: depredations of, 5, 76,
113-14,119, 122, 123; slave fears of, 21,
119; slaves in, 37, 41-5; slaves view
retreat of, 108; treatment of black
prisoners, 88—93; use of, to repress
slaves, 28, 30, 47

Confederate Congress, 16, 28, 44,170
Confederate States of America: collapse ot,
108, 171-2, 178-9; dependence on slaves,
36-7; impressment of slaves, 37-8;
recruitment of slaves, debated, 41-5;
slave subversion of, 50-1; slave support
for, 16,19; on treatment of black
prisoners, 88-9
Congregational Church, 467
Congressional Medal of Honor, 100, 271
contraband camps, 133-4, 230, 231, 376
"contrabands of war,” 37, 52
conventions of blacks, postwar, 282, 498,
502-13, 515-24; conflicts in, 503, 512,
513; election of delegates to, 507-8, 519;
independence of whites, 511-12, 518;
leadership of, 503-4, 509-10; makeup of,
282, 502, 503, 504, 507-11; moderation
of, 503-4, 505-6, 515, 521-2, 523;
organizations established by, 506, 507;
patriotism of, 517—18, 519-20; white
response to, 502, 505, 506, 508, 512
coolie labor, 352, 547

Coppin, L. J. (free Negro), 25 _

Cornish, Rev. John H., 269-70, 339
Corps d’Afrique, 72, 86
courts: black disillusionment with, 28Z,
284, 288, 289; black testimony in, 286-7;
blacks demand reform of, 286-7, 505,
521, 522-4, 547; disparity in
punishments by, 282, 284, 285-6; trials
of freedmen in, 283-5, 321; trials of
whites in, 285-6, 290
Crane, Sallie (ex-slave), 213, 247
Craney Island, Va., 457-8
Crawford County, Ga., 299-300
Crawley, Charles (ex-slave), 313
crime, see courts; violence
Cross, Cheney (ex-slave), 306
Cross, Pvt. Henry M ; , 129
Crum, Cpl. Simon (black soldier), 307-8

Crump, Richard (ex-slave), 448

Cuba: rumored sale of slaves to, 58, 118,
213,309

Culpeper, Va., 381-2
Cumberland County, Va., 25
Cunningham, Martha (ex-slave), 6-7
Curry, James (ex-slave), 231
Curtis, Mattie (ex-slave), 10
Curtis, William (ex-slave), 229, 330
Cyrus (slave, Va.), 399

Dabney, Alice (ex-slave): letter of, 333
Dabney, Thomas, 179, 253

640

Index

Darby, Mary, 178

Darling, Katie (ex-slave), 40-1,115, 372
Davenport, Charlie (ex-slave), 123-4,
320-30

Davis, Hugh, Jr., 343
Davis, James, 24, 26

Davis, Jefferson, 5, 44, 167, 171, 213, 376,
508; black views of, 44, 157, 170, 199,
200-1, 303, 369
Davis, Joe, 376
Davis, Minnie (ex-slave), 24
Davis, William (ex-slave), 20
Davis Bend, Miss., 376, 494-5
Davison, Will, 196
Day, Isaiah, 189-90
Deas, Elias Horry, 197,198, 316
Debro, Sarah (ex-slave), 5, 109,119, 128-9,
236

DeForest, John William, 203, 284, 424
Delany, Martin R., 178, 498, 520; advice to
freedmen, 388-9; envisions Corps
d’Afrique, 86, 96; Freedmen’s Bureau
agent, 382, 418-19, 510; in politics, 510,
549, 550; recruiting agent, 77, 80-1
Delany, Toussaint L’Ouverture, 78
Democratic Party, 554-5
Demopolis, Ala., 313-14
Denton, James J., 286
dependency, see freedmen and
freedwomen; mistresses, plantation;
slaveowners

DeRosset, William L., 336-7
DeSaussure family, 219
desertions, see labor, withdrawal of;

runaway slaveowners; runaway slaves
divorce, 242-3
Doan, Stephen, 415
Dodson, Ben and Betty (ex-slaves), 229
Dolly (slave), 105-6
domestics, see house servants
Dothrum, Silas (ex-slave), 191
Douglas, Emily C., 144
Douglass, Ambrose (ex-slave), 173, 177
Douglass, Charles (black soldier), 78
Douglass, Frederick, 112, 498; on blacks as
soldiers, 65-6, 69, 72; on Confederate
dependency on slaves, 37; on Pres.
Johnson, 530; as recruiter, 72-3, 77,

77-8, 80, 81, 84; as a slave, 159,196,

258; on treatment of black prisoners, 90;
on urban living, 317
Douglass, Lewis (black soldier), 78
Dove, Samuel (ex-slave), 232
Dowd, Squire (ex-slave), 324
Draft Act (1863), 71
drivers: after emancipation, 160, 161-2,

210, 342-3, 410, 450; role of, 159-60;
wartime conduct of, 14, 50, 160-1
DuBois, W. E. B., 64,102, 158, 493, 538-9,
553

Dudley, Sgt. H. D. (black soldier), 273

Dulany, Ida, 13
Dunn, Jennylin (ex-slave), 322
Dunn, Lucy Ann (ex-slave), 106
Duplin County, N.C., 398
Durham, Exter (ex-slave), 227
Dutch immigrants, 352-3

Easter, Esther (ex-slave), 11-12
Eberhart, G. L., 491-2, 496-7
Edgecombe County, N.C., 507
Edgefield, S.C., 304

Edisto Island, S.C., 113-14, 270, 405-6,
414-15, 425, 430, 446
education of blacks: black views of, 450,
484, 521, 547; by blacks, 487-8, 494-500;
curriculum, 387, 480-1, 494; difficulties
in, 320, 322, 473, 474-5, 481, 482, 484,
487-8, 489-90; enthusiasm for, 335, 471,
472-6, 485, 500-1; evaluating results of,
482-4; facilities for, 172, 475; by
missionary societies, 477, 499-500; on
plantations, 436, 475-6; segregation in,
489-91; under slavery, 472, 475, 494; by
native whites, 476, 488-9; white
response to, 279, 485-9; see also
freedmen’s aid societies; missionaries;
teachers

Edwards, Anderson (ex-slave), 193
Edwards, Richard (black preacher), 292,
296-7

election of 1860, slave perceptions of, 27
Elliott, Stephen, 206
Elliott, William, 392
Ellison, Ralph, 3, 19, 247, 455
Elmore, Grace B.: on emancipation, 180,
218, 226, 302; on postwar labor
relations, 350-1; on fate of Negro, 362;
performs domestic labor, 354
emancipation, 117-18, 169, 177, 179-87,
187-93; black initiative in, 118, 177, 180,
181, 182,186, 187; black response to,

169, 170,171-2, 177-8, 212-20, 221-9,
327-32; evasion of, 183-5, 186; impact
on children and aged, 191, 195-6, 197,
198, 215, 235-8, 330-1; slaveowning
families’ response to, 178-9, 179-81,
182-3,183, 184-5,186, 187-92, 193-9,
293-4, 372-3, 396; uncertainty of, 162,
172-7,179-81, 182-3, 185; see also
freedmen and freedwomen; mistresses,
plantation; slaveowners
Emancipation Proclamation, 5, 19, 47, 69,
138,173,183, 227, 404, 521
Emeline (ex-slave), 347
emigration: to Africa, 308; to Haiti and
Central America, 77
Emmanuel Church, Charleston, 471
employers, white: agreements among,
322-3, 350, 395, 407, 415-16; and black
soldiers, 270, 273—4; and black voters,
555, 556; experimenting with white

Index

641

labor, 351-3; on need to compel black
labor, 363, 364-8, 371-2, 379, 407-8, 434;
negotiations of, 432-7; perceptions of
black labor, 336-45, 346-51, 390, 396,

397, 416-17, 420, 431, 444-45; prefer
black labor, 353-4; terms offered by,

337, 343, 395, 396, 397, 409-13, 434, 436;
see also drivers; labor; labor contracts;
overseers; sharecropping; slaveowners;
strikes

Enterprise, Miss., 487
Episcopal Church, 467
Equal Rights Association of Georgia, 512
Equal Rights League of North Carolina,
506, 507

Evans, Eliza (ex-slave), 176
Evans, John (ex-slave), 327
Evans, Millie (ex-slave), 33
Ezell, Lorenza (ex-slave), 7

Falls, Robert (ex-slave), 46, 187-8
families, black: changing roles in, 244-6;
and labor contracts, 417-18; legacy of
slavery, 7-8,171, 204, 230, 231-2, 234-5,
237, 238-9; reunions of, 169, 170, 227,
229-37, 246-7; search for, 229-32, 235,
239, 305; wartime separations of, 33, 54,
239, 306; see also children; marriage;
names

Federal Writers’ Project, 449
Ferguson, Jane (ex-slave), 242
Fernandina, Fla., 52, 535
field hands, see labor
Fikes, Frank (ex-slave), 372-3
Finnely, Billy, 194
Fisk, Clinton B., 243, 316, 381
Fleetwood, Christopher A. (black soldier),
71, 271

Fleming, Julius J., 283
Florida: Black Code, 368-9; fears of slave
violence, 29; Jim Crow laws in, 262;
migration to, 177, 308—9; political
activity in, 535, 546; runaways in, 52;
seek white laborers, 352; wages in, 411
Flowers, Jack (ex-slave), 52, 528
Fluvanna County, Va., 140
Ford, Sarah (ex-slave), 183
foremen, see drivers
Forrest, Gen. Nathan Bedford, 91, 92
Fort Pillow Massacre, 90-1, 92, 93
Fort Sumter, S.C., 4, 178
Fort Wagner, S.C., 78
Forten, Charlotte (black teacher), 494
Fortress Monroe, Va., 226, 473
"Forty Acres and a Mule,” see land
Fourteenth Amendment, 507, 525, 531,
537

Frances (slave), 221-2
Franks, Dora (ex-slave), 21, 349
Frederick (driver), 161
Fredericksburg, Va., 395

Free Negroes, 16-17; caste pretensions of,
513-14; in cities, 315, 513-14; in
Confederate Army, 42; loyalty to
Confederacy, 16-17, 42, 508; in politics,
504, 508-9; restrictions on, 29; as
teachers, 494; in Union Army, 70, 71;
see also Charleston; New Orleans
freedmen and freedwomen: in conflicts
over racial etiquette, 252, 256-60; in
court, 282-8; defining freedom, 172,
219-20, 221-9, 296-7, 310-11, 331,

333-5, 338-40, 345, 346-7, 392-3;
dependency of, 212-13, 214-16, 327, 328,
377-8, 448-9, 451; education of, 472-501;
fears of white violence, 173,175-6, 182,
279, 428-9; laws restricting, 261-3, 319,
366-71; letters of, 332-5; movement of,
172, 177, 180,184, 212, 222, 227, 230,
292-316, 322-6, 431-2; names of, 247-51;
perceptions of former masters, 165-6,
193-5, 199-205, 299-300, 306, 327, 329,
330, 332-5, 345, 359, 372, 387-8, 401,
406; perceptions of former mistresses,
193-5, 203, 221-2, 330, 359, 372, 395; in
politics, 508, 510-11, 555-6; religious
expression of, 218, 455-71; securing
familial and marital ties, 229-47; see
also emancipation; Freedmen’s Bureau;
house servants; labor; land; migration;
missionaries; slaveowners; teachers;
Union Army; violence; women, black
freedmen’s aid societies: black views of,
490, 497-8, 499, 500; educational work
of, 477; racial attitudes of, 477-8,
479-80, 489-90, 491-3, 496-500
Freedmen’s Bureau: advice of, 243, 245-6,
380, 381, 388-9, 402-3, 409, 413; appeals
to, 238, 318, 321, 423-4; as arbitrator,
233-4, 242, 276, 382, 383-4, 409, 437,
438; black agents in, 178, 382, 388-9,
452, 510; and Black Codes, 366, 370; and
black troops, 270, 271; black views of,
279, 281, 312, 314, 324, 382, 383, 384-5,
386, 404, 406, 507, 519, 524, 525, 551;
and courts, 283-4, 285, 286; and
education, 477, 488; and emancipation,
183, 213; and black families, 231, 233-4,
240, 242, 244; on immigration, 352, 353;
and labor, 304, 307, 311, 379-82, 385-6,
408-9, 413, 416, 417, 418, 419-20, 437-8,
440-1, 442, 443; and land, 399, 400, 401,
402-3, 404, 405, 406-7, 552-3; and
migration of blacks, 230, 307, 311, 314,
323, 419; objectives of, 379-80, 381, 382,
419; perceptions of freedmen, 379-81,
384, 399, 400, 406-7, 410, 414, 428, 431,
435, 437-8, 439, 446; perceptions of
native whites, 364, 419; personnel of,
382-3; and politics, 552, 555; southern
white views of, 381, 420; and violence,
277, 280, 289

642

Index

Freeman, Mittie (ex-ekve), 121
Fugitive Slave Act, 52

fugitive slaves, see runaway slaves

Galloway, Abraham II (ex-si&ve), 286, SOS*
507

Galveston, Tex,, 318
Gamble, William, 555
G&rey, Elisha Doc (exclave I, 330
Garlic, Delia (ex-slave), 7-8
Garnet, Rev. Henry Highland (black
minister), 77, 387, 523
Garrison, William Lloyd, 78, 178, 438
Gates County, N.C., 303
Gaud, Matt, 193
Georgetown, S.C., 23, 141
Georgetown County, 55
Georgia; AME Church in, 487, 470; land
distribution in, 400-1; political activity
in, 507-8, 510, 612, 619, 545, 546 - 7 ,
547-8, 551; rumored slave uprising in,

47; segregation in, S3; slave reiUgss*
in, 132, 133; slave runaways in, 52, 58,

58; violence in, 274-6, 278, 280; wages
in, 411; see aim Savannah, Oa,

German immigrants, 362, 353
Gibbs, Rev, Jonathan C. (black minister),
471, 484, 522

Gillison* Aleck (ex-«lave), 250
Glenn, Edward (ex-slave), 22
Glenn, Robert (ex-slave), 331
Glover, Joseph, 338-9
Goodman, Andrew (exclave), 14
Goole, Frankie (ex-slave), 236*4
Gorgas, Josiah, 196, 552
g«»pel of success: in advice to IVeedmen,

, 403, 450, 622, 542
Grace (ex-slave), 394
Grandberry, Ella (ex-slave), 123
Grant, Austin (ex-slave), 298
Grant, Thomas (ex-slave), 251
"grapevine telegraph"23, 32* 52, 170
Graves, Mildred (ex-slave), 240
Gray, Ambus (ex-slave), 228
Grayson, Mary (ex-slave), 23
Greeley, Horace, 244,511
Green, Esther (ex-tlave), 331
Green, James (ex-slave), 327
Green, Virginia C. (black teacher), 494 6
Green, William P, (black soldier), 271
Greene, Jerry (ex-tlave), 260
Gregg, Annie (ex-slave), lHl-2
Grenada, Mints,, 285, 488
Gresham, Harriett (ex-slave), 217
Grey, William II, 618
Grice* Pauline (exclave), 5, 3
Griffin, Fannie (ex-slave), 122
Grimball, John Berkley, 32, 35* 349
Guendaloe plantation, S,C„ 210-11
Guidon, Lee (ex-slave), 249

Guilford County, NC, 443
Guntharpe, Violet (exalave), 328

Hadnot* Mandy (ex^lavei, 328

Haines* A, II tex^lave). 502
Haitian*, 540
Haley, Jack* 306-7
Ilalifttx County, N.C., 439
Hall, Thoms* C««dav#l, 44§

Hallowell, Col. K N„ 85
Hamilton, Susan (axalava), HI
Hammond, James Henrv* 250
Hampton, Vic, 494
Hampton Institute* 204* 818
Hannah (stava), 150
Hardison, Mary C It, 139
Harnett County, N <\ 173, 177* 190
Harp, Anawi teMtami, Ml
Harp* Tom, 250

Harris, Abram (tx^lave), 7* 121
Harris, Annie (axatavt), 111

Harris, Blanche (black teacher), 497 8
Harris* David <7* 179

Harris, Jamas II (fhsa Nsfro), SIM* 606

507 , 549 60

Harm William 85

Harrison Cnunty, Tex * 184 5

Hatton* %t Cmwm W (black wldiert,

84 5

Hawkins, Annie mxalavei, 203
ffaywtxxk Felix texalave), 8, 46, 217* 3II
448 9

Hactor (siava), 106, 164

Helena, Ark , 476* 499
Henry, Ida (ex-slave!* 13
Herndon, Temple (ex slave). 227
Heyward, Charles* 195
Heyward* Daniel, 433 4
Heyward, Duncan Clinch, 196* 248
fteyward, Edward Barnwell, mi 341* Ilf*
411

Heyward, William, 856, 558
Heyward plantations* 409
Higginaon* Thomas Wentworth m
alwwe of slave ifwnwrtimi#* 49 60; m
blnrk religion* 401 m commander of
black regiment, 58, m 9* m 7(1* 88, 85,

«)* no* m mi m, mu

Hill* Albert texalsvai* 191
Hill Jennie (ex slavei* 239 1
Hill* Little tax slave!, 837* 949

Hodlm, Ji®* m

Holme*, Emma, 47, fil* 87, 116, 124* 147,
Wt 154, 197, 297, 391* 847* 350, ;i?7*
*****mm domestic labor* 965* 367
Home Guards* 304
Homer* Hill lex slave), 33 , 34
Hom<wtaad Act, 403

Miml Rev James W Oduck minister f, 287,
503 4* 605, W!

Hojwon* Motile (ex Slave)* 109

Index

643

house servants, 21-2,156-9; "desertion”
of, in Civil War, 55, 105-6, 106-7, 136,
137, 138,155-7; disaffection of, 55, 138,
152, 163; faithfulness of, 150-2, 157;
postwar, 180, 213-14, 219, 244-5, 293-6,
297, 298, 301-2, 312, 331, 332, 346-51,
354-8, 395, 396, 432; whites assume
duties of, 347, 348, 351, 354r-8
Houston, Tex., 314

Howard, Gen. Oliver O., 380, 385, 405
Howell, Joseph, 152
Howell, Robert P., 154-5
Huggins, Alex (ex-slave), 59
Hughes, Lizzie (ex-slave), 181
Hughes, Margaret (ex-slave), 116
Humphreys, Gov. Benjamin, 267-8, 272
Hunter, Gen. David, 68, 76, 77, 98
Hunter, Hester (ex-slave), 118
Hunter, Rev. William H. (black chaplain),
465-6

Huntsville, Ala., 313
Hurley, Emma (ex-slave), 6, 194
"hush-harbors,” 26
Hutson, William (ex-slave), 219

"I Lost My Massa When Dey Set Me
Free,” 298

immigrants: as replacements for black
labor, 352-3, 547

Indians: blacks compared to, 67-8, 278,
361-2; use of black troops against, 67-8
Ingram, Wash (ex-slave), 184, 248
insurance companies, 319
insurrections: absence of, 45-6, 48-50; in
Civil War, 46-8; fears of, by freedmen,
295, 425-30, 439-40, 528, 552, 554; fears
of, by slaves, 15, 28-9, 30, 46-8, 60,

62-3, 147-9

intermarriage, 129-30, 243, 266, 548; see
also miscegenation

Irish: compared to blacks, 361, 478, 532;
on recruitment of blacks, 71; as
replacements for black labor, 352, 353
Ivy, Lorenzo (ex-slave), 420-1
Izard, Allen S., 407-8

Jackson, Martin (ex-slave), 41, 204,

249-50

Jackson, Miss., 183, 381, 385-6
Jackson, Squires (ex-slave), 22-3
Jackson, Tom (ex-slave), 58
Jacob (ex-slave), 392
Jake (ex-slave): letter of, 333
James, Lorenzo, 420
Jarvis, Harry (ex-slave), 10, 205
Jefferson County, Tex., 184
Jeffersonton, Ga., 289
Jenkins, Bob (ex-slave), 440-1
Jenkins, Henry D. (ex-slave), 152
Jenkins Ferry, Ark., 92
Jews, 532

Jim (driver), 342-3

Jim Crow laws, see segregation, racial
Johns, Pvt. Henry T., 70,127,132
Johns Island, S.C., 407, 434
Johnson, President Andrew, 271, 272, 404;

black views of, 528-31, 537-8
Johnson, Anna (ex-slave), 9
Johnson, Jane (ex-slave), 329
Johnson, Prince (ex-slave), 177
Johnston, Parke (ex-slave), 215
Jones, Albert (ex-slave, soldier), 103
Jones, Bob (ex-slave), 8
Jones, Rev. C. C., 54-5,139
Jones, Charles C., Jr., 55,197-8, 360-1,

445

Jones, Christopher (black preacher), 25
Jones, Eva B., 178-9, 348, 355
Jones, Hope L., 359
Jones, James F. (black soldier), 95
Jones, Rev. John, 293
Jones, Mary, 139, 244, 302; on postwar
labor relations, 348, 397, 407, 444-5
Jones, Peter K. (ex-slave), 508
Jordon, Stephen (ex-slave), 32, 234-5
Jubilee, 177-8; myth of, 212, 216, 217; on
plantations and farms, 216-18; in urban
centers, 177-8
Jule (slave), 114

jurors, black, 287; agitation for, 287, 505,
521, 522-3

Kansas: black regiments, 68, 70, 92
Kate (ex-slave), 397
Keckley, Elizabeth (ex-slave), 201
Kellogg, Martha L., 492
Kelly, A. W., 319-20
Kendricks, Tines (ex-slave), 230, 300
Kentucky: black political activity in, 517,
518; emancipation in, 182; recruitment
of black troops in, 71, 74; rumored slave
uprising in, 47
Ketchum, Col. A. P., 430
King, George G. (ex-slave), 224
King William County, Va,, 52
"Kingdom Cornin’,” 111-12
Kingston, Ga., 47
Kinney, Nicey (ex-slave), 330
Kirkland, Mary, 150
Knox, Thomas W., 376
Knoxville, Tenn., 256

labor, black, post-emancipation: abuses of,
372-3, 375-6, 412-13, 416, 417, 418-19,
420-1, 520; attempts to replace, 351-3;
attitudes toward work, 226-7, 336, 345,
388, 393, 433; bargaining power of,
340-1, 394-5, 415, 435-7, 437-40, 442-3;
in cities, 177—8, 312—13, 321—2, 390, 391,
441-2; demands of, 392-4, 395, 396,
397-9, 432-7; dependency of whites on,
354-9; disillusionment of, 377-8, 391,

644

Index

labor, black, post-emancipation (cont.)
393-4, 418, 420-1, 422-5, 432-5, 443,
446, 448-9; experiments with, 376,
377-9, 393-4; and family relations,
244-6, 417-18; free and slave compared,
340, 342-3; hours of, 341, 410, 434-5; in
households, 346-51; negotiations of,
392-6, 432-7; pace of, 340-1, 342-3, 345;
restrictions on occupations of, 319, 322,
366-8; on Saturday and Sunday, 346,
393, 417, 433, 434,436; shares for, 343,
412, 434, 437, 438, 448; strikes of, 378,
396, 416, 437-42; wages for, 309, 327,
329, 410, 411—12, 438-9, 521; withdrawal
of, in Civil War, 52-9, 135-9,144-5,
after emancipation, 292-304, 431-2; see
also drivers; employers; Freedmen’s
Bureau; house servants; labor contracts;
overseers; sharecropping; slaveowners;
slaves; Union Army
labor agents, 308-10, 437
labor contracts: abuses of, 412-13, 416-20,
423, 476; black disillusionment with,
413-14, 418, 421-2, 422-5, 432-3;
disputes over, 416-19, 422-5, 432-5, 438,
445; enforcement of, 417-20, 423-4;
introduction of, 377, 379, 408-9;
negotiation of, 432-7; refusal to sign,

399, 400, 407, 414-15, 431, 446; terms of,
409-13, 434, 436, 475-6, 555
Labor Regulating Association, 416
land: black expectations of, 392, 398-404,
414, 417, 425, 552-3, 556; distribution of,
400-1, 404; purchases of, 403-4;
restrictions on ownership and rental of,
367-8, 407, 416; see also abandoned
plantations; Freedmen’s Bureau; land
confiscation; sharecropping
land confiscation: black opposition to,

521-2, 547; black sentiment for, 404,

526, 551

Langston, John Mercer, 77, 539
Lavine, Margaret (ex-slave), 119
Lawrence, Kansas, 475
laws, see Black Codes; vagrancy laws
Leathers, Jim, 326
Lebanon, Tenn., 548
LeConte, Emma, 110, 301-2
LeConte, Joseph, 147
Lee, Gen. Robert E., 44, 108
LeGrand, Julia, 158, 350, 356
Leigh, Frances Butler: fears of freedmen
violence, 427, 429-30; on postwar labor
relations, 341-2, 347, 349, 423, 432-3,

447

Leigh, Jim (ex-slave), 321
Lenton, Melton R. (black soldier), 273
Leon County, Fla., 347
lessees, 376, 416-17; see also abandoned
plantations

Lester plantation, Fla., 224
Lewis, Henry (ex-slave), 184

Lexington, Ky., 319
Liberia, 504; emigration to, 308
Liberty, Va., 384
Liberty County, Ga., 444-5
Lincoln, President Abraham, 3, 27, 47, 49,
66, 69, 170, 217, 308, 392, 503; on black
soldiers, 69, 71, 81, 86, 90; black views
of, 122, 185, 449, 524, 527-9
Lincoln County, Ga., 275
literacy, 22-3, 198, 472
Livingston Parish, La., 48
Loguen, Amelia, 78
Long, Pvt. Thomas (ex-slave, soldier),
101-2

Lotus Club, Washington, D.C., 513
Loughborough, Mary Ann, 110
Louisiana, 69, 488, 524; Black Codes in,
367, 368; disaffection of slaves in, 13-14,
52,135-8; fears of black violence in, 47,
428; Freedmen’s Bureau in, 383; labor
relations in, 375, 377-9, 393, 440;
migration to, 308-9; political activity in,
508-9, 525, 535-6, 546, 550; recruitment
of black troops in, 68, 70; removal of
slaves from, 32, 33, 34; wages in, 411,
412; see also New Orleans
Love, Louis (ex-slave), 33
Love, Mary (ex-slave), 395
Lowery, Lucinda (ex-slave), 232
Lowndes County, Ala., 322-3, 396
Lucas, Charles (slave), 105
Lucas, Daniel (ex-slave), 329
Lucas, James (ex-slave), 212-13
Lumpkin, Mary Ann (ex-slave), 172
Lumpkin, Robert, 167-8
Lumpkin’s Jail, Richmond, 168, 172
Lyles, Moses (ex-slave), 214
Lynch, Edward, 198

Lynch, James D., 499; as AME organizer,
455, 456, 467; on black ignorance of
emancipation, 184, 185; on Pres.

Johnson, 530; in politics, 471, 511,

537-8; on racial identity, 540, 542-3
Lynchburg, Va., 149, 313
lynching, see violence
Lynn, Mary (ex-slave), 53

Macon, Ga., 288, 310, 312, 475
MacRae, Donald, 338, 351, 425
Madison County, Miss., 147
Magill, Rev. S. W., 499-500
Magnolia plantation, La., 145, 148
Mahaly, Elick (ex-slave), 551
Malden, W. Va., 499
Mallard, Mary S., 124
Mammy Milly (slave), 157
Manigault, Charles, 161
Manigault, Louis, 31, 35, 253, 411; on
wartime slave behavior, 104-6, 155,

157-8, 161, 164-5

Manning, Allen V. (ex-slave), 31, 33
"Many Thousand Go,” 221, 225

Index

645

Margaret (ex-slave), 346
Marion County, Fla., 286
Mark’s Mill, Ark., 89
marriage, slave, 234-5, 238-9, 239-40;
after emancipation, 227, 232-5, 240-1,
241-3, 244-5, 246-7; see also families,
black

Marrs, Elijah (ex-slave), 48
Martin, Isaac (ex-slave), 194
Maryland, 56-7, 71, 74, 75
Massachusetts: black regiments, 73, 77-8,
82, 83, 85, 90, 94
masters, see slaveowners
Maxwell, Joseph, 307
McClain, "Big Jim,” 193
McCollough, Amos (black teacher), 487
McCray, Stephen (ex-slave), 228
McCree, Ed (ex-slave), 177, 327
McLean, Taylor Hugh, 190
meetings, see conventions of blacks;
political activity

Memphis, Tenn.: migration to, 311, 313,
314; race riot, 281; strike in, 441
Meridian, Miss., 319, 386
Merritt, Susan (ex-slave), 184-5
Methodist Episcopal Church (North), 467,
468

Methodist Episcopal Church (South), 464,
467-8

Middleton, Henry A., 55
midwives, 339

migration, black, 30-5, 296-326; black
disillusionment with, 309-10, 321-2,
323-4, 329; black hostility to, 315-16,
316-17; forced, during Civil War, 30-5;
motives for, 230, 297, 298, 299-300,
305-14; response of whites and Federal
officials to, 305, 311, 314-15, 316-21,
322-3

Millaudon plantation, La., 145-6
Milledgeville, Ga., 311
Miller, Anna (ex-slave), 57, 372
Milliken’s Bend, Battle of, 70, 89
Millner, Archie (ex-slave), 326
miscegenation: black fears of, 266-7, 522,
548; impact of emancipation on, 243;
and legacy of slavery, 126-7, 243, 265-6;
Union soldiers and, 129-30; white fears
of, 260, 265-6, 554

missionaries, black: background of, 450,
456; commitment of, 450-5, 466-8;
freedmen views of, 455; need for, 455,
457, 462-3, 463-4, 493-4; views of
freedmen, 451, 454, 456-7, 458-9
missionaries, white: black criticism of,

463; commitment of, 452-3, 460-1,
477-80; freedmen views of, 453-4; views
of freedmen, 453, 457-8, 459-61, 462,
477-9; see also freedmen’s aid societies;
teachers

Mississippi: Black Codes in, 367-8, 369;
Chinese laborers in, 352; defections of

slaves in, 52, 59,137-8; fears of slave
violence in, 28, 46, 47; free Negroes in,
509; Jim Crow laws in, 261, 262; land
expectations in, 400; migration to,

308-9, 323; petition of freedmen of, 201,
369; political activity in, 523, 546;
removal of slaves from, 31, 32, 33; wages
in, 411-12

Missouri, 70, 71, 182
mistresses, plantation: assume domestic
duties, 347, 348, 354-8; "betrayal” of,

11- 12,152, 154, 155,158, 163; death of,
19, 60,194-5, 202, 203; dependency of,
180, 202-3, 301, 330, 359, 354-8; and
emancipation, 178-9,194, 196, 197; fears
of slave violence, 30, 35, 48, 60-3,148-9;
perceptions of slave behavior, 4, 11,

12- 13,14,15,17-18, 21, 55-6, 63,107-8,
110, 111, 139,142,144,151-2,162;
return to plantations, 209-11; and slave
children, 235-7; temperaments of, 11,
115, 182-3, 194; see also emancipation;
freedmen and freedwomen; slaveowners;
slaves; violence

Mitchell, Moses (ex-slave), 113
Mitchell, Sam (ex-slave), 109
Mobile, Ala., 263, 313, 314, 318-19, 320,
323, 469

Monfort, Lieut. Theodorick W., 41
Montgomery, Ala., 313, 314, 319
Montgomery, Col. James, 93
Moore, H. A., 409
Moore, J. B., 337

Moore, Stephen (body servant), 39-40
Moore, Gov. Thomas O., 175, 340
Moore, Van (ex-slave), 34
Mordecai, Emma, 399
Morgan, Kathryn L., 186-7
Morgan, Sarah, 117,123,147,151
Moses, Charlie (ex-slave), 10
Murray, Robert (ex-slave), 3

names, slave, 176, 247-8; after
emancipation, 228, 248-51, 454
Nansemond County, Va., 30
Nashville, Tenn., 263, 319, 441, 499
Natchez, Miss., 46, 52, 263, 286, 313; abuse
of freedmen in, 318, 319-20; black
teachers in, 497-8
National Equal Rights League, 506
Native Guards, 42, 70,102
Neblett, Mrs. W. H., 12
"negro,” as term of address, 255, 539,
540-1

Negroes, see freedmen and freedwomen;

clflVMI

Nell, William C., 77
Nelson County, Va., 415
New Bern, N.C., 64, 73, 475, 519
New Orleans, La.: abuse of blacks in, 318,
319; black schools in, 279, 475, 490;
black soldiers in, 42, 70, 95; courts in,

646

Index

New Orleans, La. (cont.)

286; fears of black violence, 148,149;
fears of white violence, 279, 288; free
Negroes in, 17, 378, 508-9, 513, 535-6;
political activity in, 535-6, 547, 549;
race riot, 281; racial segregation in, 262,
263-4, 264; slave runaways in, 32, 52;
strike in, 441-2

New Orleans Tribune (black newspaper):
on amnesty, 404, 524, 525-7; on Black
Code, 368, 370; on Freedmen’s Bureau,
383, 386; on "ingratitude” of slaves, 300;
on Pres. Johnson, 530; on labor
relations, 377-8, 388, 391, 398, 413-14,
442; on Lincoln, 528; on miscegenation,
266; on racial identity, 543-4; on racial
unity, 514; on segregation, 263-4, 493-1;
on slaves in Confederate Army, 43; on
suffrage and politics, 524, 534, 535-6,
537, 543-4, 547, 550-1, 554-5; on "white
friends,” 512-13
New York Times, 67
Newman, Virginia (ex-slave), 33
"nigger,” use of, 252, 254-5
Nightingale Hall plantation, S.C., 146,

209, 210

Nillin, Margrett (ex-slave), 229
"Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,”
405

Norfolk, Va., 170, 280, 288-9, 313,

534-5

Norfolk County, Va., 406
North: migration to, 307-8; race relations
in, black view of, 504, white view of,

260, 261, 551

North Carolina: black political activity in,
502-7, 508, 513, 517, 519, 525, 531; slave
runaways in, 52; wages in, 411
Northampton County, Va., 304
northerners, black: avoid military service,
78-9; compared to slaves as soldiers, 99;
in Union Army, 73, 76-8; perceptions of
southern whites, 94

northerners, white: as employers of black
labor in South, 346, 376, 393-4, 416-17;
in southern politics, 549
Norton, Thomas H., 424

Oconee, Ga., 177
Ogeechee District, Ga., 25, 437
Opelika, Ala., 279

Opelousas, La., 35,153; Black Code of, 368
Osborne, Annie (ex-slave), 109
overseers: after emancipation, 146-7, 303,
346, 371, 373, 374, 393, 410, 435; role of,
13, 104-5, 145; on slave disaffection, 55,
105, 142, 146-7; violence against, 13,

137, 145-6,148,152, 209, 373; wartime
conduct of, 13-14, 116,145, 146-7, 175,
176, 209

Page, George (slave), 157

Parham, William H. (black school
principal), 79

Parker, Richard (ex-slave), 406
Parkes, Anna (ex-slave), 299
"paterollers,” see slave patrols
Paterson, Sarah Jane (ex-slave), 253
Payne, Sgt. J. H. (black soldier), 272
Peake, Mary (free Negro teacher), 494
Pennington, Rev. James W. C. (black
minister), 456-7

Petersburg, Va., 87, 199, 313, 322
Pettigrew, Caroline, 12
Petty, John (ex-slave), 323-4
Philbrick, Edward, 394
Philips, Ethelred, 255, 260; fear of black
violence, 425-6; hiring white servant,
351,444

Pike County, Ala., 360
Pinckney, Capt. Thomas: returns to
reclaim plantation, 206-9, 211
Pine Hill plantation, Fla., 347, 431-2
plantation manager, see Shields, Wilmer
The Planter, 51
Plaquemines Parish, La., 378
Poison Spring, Battle of, 92
police: blacks demand employment as,
287-8; blacks serve as, 552; violence
committed by, 288, 290, 304, 321
political activity, black: on eve of
Reconstruction, 545-56; see also
individual states; conventions of blacks;
suffrage

Pollard, Levi (ex-slave), 327
Pool, Rilla (ex-slave), 118
poor whites: education of, 489-90; on
abuse of black laborers, 420; Yankees
compared to, 124
Pooshee plantation, S.C., 122
Pope, Alexander and Cornelia, 155
population: free blacks, 16-17; slaves, 3;

urban blacks, 313-14
Port Gibson, Miss., 16
Port Hudson, La., 42, 70, 102
Portsmouth, Va., 313
preachers, black: on Civil War and
freedom, 25, 218, 224, 292, 296-7, 402,
456, 465-6, 470; freedmen prefer, 461,
464-5, 467; moral advice of, 243-4, 457;
need to educate, 458, 459, 461, 471; in
politics, 470-1, 503, 508, 509, 510, 545,
546-7; poverty of, 468; restrictions on,
24, 368; role of, 24-5, 183, ^70, 471;
violence on, 25, 279, 470; white views of,
24, 25, 469-70; see also individual
denominations; church; religion
preachers, white: advice to slaves, 24, 116;
after emancipation, 461, 465-6, 467;
credibility of, 24, 464-5
Presbyterian Church, 24, 467, 471
Price, George (ex-slave), 110-11
Price, Giles (free Negro), 508
Pringle, Jane, 417

Index

647

prisoners of war, black: treatment of, 79,
87-93

Pritchard, Thomas (ex-slave), 58
Proctor, Jenny (ex-slave), 212
provost courts, 288-4, 290
Pryor, Sara, 349
Pugh, A. Franklin, 137, 142
Pugh, David, 148
Pugh, Mary Williams, 34
Putnam, Sallie P., 169
Pyles, Jordan (driver), 162

Quadroon Bill, 535-6

race consciousness, 538-45

race riots: Charleston, 280; Memphis, 281;

New Orleans, 281; Norfolk, 280
racial etiquette, see address, terms of;

segregation, racial
racial segregation, see segregation
Raleigh, N.C., 311, 322, 489
Raleigh, Walter (ex-slave, preacher), 22
Randall, Millie (ex-slave), 191
Randolph, Benjamin F. (black minister),
382, 547

Ransdell, John H., 137, 174-5
rape, of black women: by native whites,
239, 277, 280; by Union soldiers, 130,

151; black resistance to, 239
Rapides Parish, La., 137, 174-5
Ravenel, Caroline, 251
Ravenel, Charlotte S. J., 355
Ravenel, Henry William: acknowledges
emancipation, 180-1, 183-4; on black
troops, 268, 269, 271; paternalism of,

114, 189, 191, 337; perceptions of
freedmen, 149, 259, 314, 365, 396;
perceptions of slaves, 26-7, 140, 141,

152; on Reconstruction, 553
Reconstruction, Congressional, 490, 545-56
Reconstruction, Presidential: black views
of, 524, 525, 528, 529-31, 537-8
Reconstruction Acts of 1867, 546
recruiting agents, see Union Army, black
registration of voters, black, 545-7, 552
religion, black: in Civil War and slavery,
23-4, 122, 464-5; and emancipation, 169,
170, 218; independent expression of, 24,
26, 127, 460, 461-2, 464-6, 466-70;
northern black views of, 454, 458-9;
white views of, 127, 458, 459-61, 462,
469-70; see also individual
denominations; church; missionaries;
preachers

Remond, Charles Lenox, 77
Republican Party: black views of, 504-5,
525, 536, 536-7, 547, 549; black
ministers in, 452, 471; fears of black
domination, 548-9

Revels, Rev. Hiram R. (black minister),

471

Rhett, Edmund, 268

"Rhett, Julian and Sambo,” 112-13
Rhode Island: black regiment, 80
Richardson, F. D., 35
Richmond, Va.: abuse of blacks in, 37-8,
38, 280, 317-18; black Confederate
recruits in, 42, 44; black labor in, 391,
395, 441, 442, 552; liberation of, 167-72;
migration to, 311, 313; racial
segregation in, 262, 263, 264; slave sales
in, 35, 36

Rivers, Sgt. Prince (black soldier), 64, 510
Roach, Betty (ex-slave), 120
Robeson County, N.C., 517
Robinson, Harriet (ex-slave), 212
Robinson, Tom (ex-slave), 213
Rock, John S., 77, 84
Rose (ex slave), 339
Rose, William (ex-slave), 6
Row, Annie (ex-slave), 9-10
Rowan County, N.C., 438-9
Rowe, Katie (ex-slave), 115-16, 194-5,
424-5

Ruffin, Edmund, 15-16, 29, 36, 47, 161,

379

runaway slaveowners, 111-13
runaway slaves, 5, 19, 21, 32, 34, 35, 38-9,
40-1, 41-2, 48, 51-9, 65, 105-6,132-5,
160, 205; colonies of, 57; motives of, 5,
19, 32, 34, 51, 53, 57-9, 134,176, 205;
punishment of, 54-7,105
Rusk County, Tex., 184-5
Russell, William, 16, 18, 25

St. Helena Island, S.C., 388-9, 394
St. Landry Parish, La., 368
St. Mark’s Episcopalian Church,
Charleston, 467
St. Martin Parish, La., 555
St. Simon Island, Ga., 347, 475
Salisbury, N.C., 221, 286
San Antonio, Tex., 319
Sanders, Lucy (ex-slave), 307
Sanders, W. W. (black soldier), 273
Savage, Jack (ex-slave), 105,164
Savannah, Ga.: black schools in, 475,
499-500; migration to, 314; political
activity in, 545; religious activity in, 23,
400, 467; segregation in, 261, 263; strike
in, 441

Savannah Educational Association,

499 500

Saxton, Gen. Rufus, 381, 430
Scalawags, 549

schools, see education of blacks
Sea Islands, S.C.: black schools in, 475,
494; and Civil War, 113-14,161, 225;
land question in, 405-6, 406-7;
missionaries in, 463; political activity in,
548-9; race and labor relations in,
post-emancipation, 202, 203, 270, 376,
388-9, 390, 393-4, 411, 440; recruitment
of black troops in, 68, 75-6; see also

648

Index

Sea Islands, S.C. (cont.)

Beaufort; Edisto Island; Johns Island;
St. Helena Island; Wadmalaw Island
Seals, Bowman (free Negro), 17
segregation, racial: blacks challenge,
263-4, 522; in churches, 465, 469; in
North, 260, 261; in public conveyances,
261, 262; . in public places, 261, 262-3; in
schools, 264, 489-91; whites defend, 262,
265

Selma, Ala., 37, 284, 289, 319, 391, 552;

migration to, 311, 313, 343
Sepoy Mutiny, India, 62
servants, see house servants
sexual practices, 243-4
Shackford, C. M., 453
sharecropping, 446-8
Shaw, Robert, 78
Sheppard, Morris (ex-slave), 185
Sherman, Gen. William T., 45, 119, 122,
132-3, 400-1

Shields, Wilmer: experience as plantation
manager in La., 135-7, 422, 431, 435-6
Shigg, Abalod (ex-slave), 400
Ship Island, Miss., 101
Shotfore, Silas (ex-slave), 213
Showvely, Martha (ex-slave), 231
Shreveport, La., 311
Sierra Leone, 504

Simms, Rev. James M. (ex-slave), 545
Simms, Thomas (ex-slave), 545
Simpson, Jane (ex-slave), 193-4
Simpsonville, Ky., 48
Sister Carrie (ex-slave), 225
skin whiteners, use of, 541, 542, 544
slave drivers, see drivers
slave patrols: black fears of, 8, 28, 119,

219, 235, 317; in Civil War, 28, 54,113;
postwar, 428

slave trade, domestic, 33, 35-6, 56, 58
slaveowners: "betrayal” of, 41-2, 106, 111,
152-3,154-6, 161,163, 234; death of, 7,

8, 9, 10, 33,116, 188,193, 194-5, 326,
330; dependency of, 178, 188, 202-3,
203-4, 330, 359; fears of black violence,
105, 147, 148-9, 425-30; flight of,

111-13; on military use of slaves, 37,
38-9, 43, 44; paternalism of, 192, 195-6,
359-63; perceptions of freed slaves,

164-5,196-8, 199, 205-12, 218, 223, 226,
244, 251, 293-6, 297, 298-9, 300, 301-2,
324-5, 354, 359-63, 364-6; perceptions of
slave behavior, 15-16, 27, 31, 35, 40,

54-5, 56-7, 62, 104-6,106, 107, 111, 114,
137-8,139-42, 143,144,148, 150-1,

152, 154-6, 157-8,161, 163,175, 180;
return to plantations, 164-5, 203-4,
205-9; temperaments of, 9-10, 58,

115-16, 174,182,193-4, 372-3; see also
amnesty; emancipation; employers,
white; freedmen and freedwomen;

mistresses, plantation; slaves; violence
slavery: black assessments of, 10, 46, 159,
196, 204-5, 246-7, 298, 387-8, 518-19;
brutality of, 8, 131, 224; compared to
freedom, 228, 228-9; defended, 188-9,
361; dependency encouraged by, 216,
451; and racial etiquette, 252-3, 257-8;
strategies learned from, 19; white guilt
over, 189

"Slavery Chain Done Broke At Last,” 167
slaves: as body servants, 39-41;
circumspection of, 19-20, 22-3, 24, 25,
26, 44, 53, 119, 126; in cities, 29, 316; on
death in white families, 7-9, 19;
difficulty in controlling, 11, 12-13,

13-14, 55,104-6, 107, 109; disaffection
of, 116-17, 135-9, 139-44, 144-8, 152-6,
157, 160-1, 163; expropriations of, 35,
122-3,136, 137, 140-3, 145, 148, 161,
168, 173-4, 207, 209; "faithfulness” of,
31, 34, 40, 46-9, 110-11,135, 136,

149-52, 154, 157,161, 163; impressment
of, 36, 37-9, 75-6; meetings of, 25, 26,

32; as military laborers, 37, 38-9, 97-8;
names of, 247-8; perceptions of masters,
3, 5, 7, 8,10, 54, 58, 59, 115, 117-18,

120, 158-9, 163, 185, 201; perceptions of
mistresses, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10,11, 19, 21, 109,
114, 115,116,1584,185, 187; as
plantation managers, 14, 113; as
prisoners of war, 87-93; religious
expression of, 23-5, 122,127; removal of,
30-5, 56,105, 106; repression of, 13,
27-30, 47, 48, 55-6, 174-5, 184; response
to Union Army, 50-1, 108-9, 118-25,
130-1, 135, 139, 1784, 175, 176; sale of,
33, 35-6, 56, 105; as soldiers, 44-5, 64,

65, 68-76, 79-103; see also Civil War;
Confederate States of America; drivers;
emancipation; house servants;
insurrections; mistresses, plantation;
runaway slaves; slaveowners; slavery;
Union Army; violence; women, black
Smalls, Robert (ex-slave), 25, 51, 101, 178,
248, 510

Smart, Adam and Fanny (ex-slaves), 234
Smedes, Susan Dabney, 157, 248
Smith, Berry (ex-slave), 118
Smith, Eliza Huger, 359
Smith, Jordon (ex-slave), 311
Smith, Liza (ex-slave), 189
Smith, Lou (ex-slave), 217
Smith, Melvin (ex-slave), 298
Smith, Nancy (ex-slave), 7
Smith, Sarah Ann (ex-slave), 299
Smith, Silas (ex-slave), 188, 215
Smith, Thomas, 379
Sneed plantation, Tex., 338
soldiers, see Confederate Army; Union
Army

songs, black: on beleaguered masters, 33,

Index

649

292; on black driver, 160; on coming of
Yankees, 117, 121-2; on J. Davis, 170,
199, 303; of freedom, 104, 107, 167, 169,
211, 217, 221, 224, 225; on land
aspirations, 402; of migration, 33, 292;
on religion, 462; subversive intent of, 23
Soustan, Isabella A. (ex-slave): letter of,
332

South Carolina: Black Code, 367; black
jurors in, 287; black regiments, 64, 68,
69, 75-6, 83, 86, 93; internal migration
in, 305-6, 307; political activity in, 509,
510, 515, 520, 520-1, 532-3, 535, 546,
547, 548-9, 551-2; rumored black
uprising in, 47; wages in, 411; see also
Charleston; Sea Islands; Beaufort
southerners, black, see free Negroes;

freedmen and freedwomen; slaves
southerners, white: fears of black
education, 485-7, 488; fears of black
suffrage, 545-6, 546, 552-5; fears of
black violence, 46-8, 425-30, 528; see
also employers; mistresses, plantation;
slaveowners; Union Army
Sparkman, James R., 429
Sparks, Eliza (ex-slave), 121
Spencer, Cornelia, 196
Spicer, Laura (ex-slave), 232-3
Stansbury, Sarah W., 495-6
Stanton, Edwin, Secretary of War, 400
Steams, Charles and Etta, 346
Stephens, Alexander, 16
Stevens, Thaddeus, 404, 525
Stiles, William Henry, 337, 418
Still, Tom, 166
Stone, Amanda, 141,154
Stone, James, 153-4
Stone, John B., 373
Stone, Kate, 111, 134, 373; on black
domestics, 357-8; fears of slave violence,
60, 149, 162

Stoops, Capt. Randolph T., 385
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 449, 476
strikes, see labor, black
Stroyer, Jacob (ex-slave), 39, 248
suffrage, black: agitation for, 503, 505,

525, 531-8; exercise of, 555-6;
preparations for exercise of, 534-5, 536,
545-55; white hostility toward, 533, 536,
545-6, 552-5
suffrage, women's, 532
Sullivan, Jerry (black soldier), 74
Sumner, Charles, 525
surnames, see names, slave
Surry County, Va., 57, 416
Sutton, Jane (ex-slave), 237, 306
Swedish immigrants, 352, 353
Sweet, W. (overseer), 146
Swett, Isham (ex-slave), 508
Sykes, Jem (black overseer), 161

Tappan, Lewis, 493
Tatnall, Isaac (ex-slave), 58
Tatom, Charity (ex-slave), 251
Taylor, Tom (black soldier), 64
teachers, black: backgrounds of, 313,

494-5, 497, 499; Cardozo and, 495-6;
commitment of, 454, 494-5, 498; as
disciplinarians, 482; need for, 462-3,
493-4; perceptions of freedmen, 454; in
politics, 496; segregation of, 497; white
missionary response to, 496-8; white
southern response to, 487-8; see also
education of blacks
teachers, white: backgrounds of, 477,

488-9; black views of, 474, 476, 484,
484-5; commitment of, 452, 477, 479-80,
484-5; as disciplinarians, 482;
evaluating students, 482-4; perceptions
of blacks, 453, 477-9, 482, 483; social
relations of, 491-2; white hostility
toward, 487-8, 491; see also education of
blacks; freedmen’s aid societies;
missionaries

tenant farming, see sharecropping
Tennessee, 69, 352, 411; political activity
in, 511, 537-8, 548

Texas: emancipation in, 184-5, 216-17;

Jim Crow laws in, 262; migration to, 31,
32-3, 34, 308-9, from, 306; wages in, 411
theft, as defined by blacks, 142-3
Thomas, Gertrude Clanton, 200-1, 304;
describes defection of servants, 293-6;
experience with domestic labor, 349-50,
355

Thomas, Isaac (ex-slave), 250
Thomas, Jacob (ex-slave), 229
Thomas, Jefferson, 179, 293-6
Thomasville, Ga., 507-8
Thompson, Hyman (ex-slave), 490
Tillman, Mollie (ex-slave), 213-14
Toussaint L’Ouverture, 494, 510
Towne, Laura, 245, 460, 463, 480, 548-9
trade unions, 442

Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond, 37,
312-13

Trenholm, George A., 189
Trescot, William Henry, 22
Trimble, Aleck (ex-slave), 213
Trowbridge, Col. Charles, 430
Trowbridge, J. T., 362-3
Tubman, Harriet (ex-slave), 93-4
Turner, Antoinette, 482
Turner, Henry McNeal (black minister); as
AME organizer, 452, 458, 467, 470; on
black soldiers, 67-8, 83, 86, 95, 96, 97; as
chaplain, 64, 173, 450; on education,

480; on emigration, 308; on Pres.
Johnson, 530-1; on labor relations, 398;
on miscegenation, 267; on need for black
missionaries, 462, 463-4; in politics, 452,
471, 510, 546-7; racial pride of, 453-1,

650

Index

Turner, Henry McNeal (cont.)

502, 540-1; on sacking of Beaufort,
140-1; on Union Army, 318; on white
violence, 279

Turner, Lou (ex-slave), 237
Turner, Nat (slave), 23, 57, 62, 66, 87
Turner, Rev. Robert, 190
Turner, West (ex-slave), 402
Tuscaloosa, Ala., 321
Tuscumbia, Ala., 321

Ulrich, Ann (ex-slave), 395
"uncle,” as term of address, 252, 511
Uncle Andrew (ex-slave), 192
Uncle Eph (ex-slave), 192
Uncle Jacob (driver), 210, 211
Uncle Lewis (ex-slave), 155
Uncle Mack (slave), 26
Uncle Si (ex-slave), 59
Uncle Toliver (slave), 30
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 10, 125, 449, 476
Union Army: abuse of slaves and
freedmen, 124-6,128-31, 132-3, 139,
318, 385, 519; advice to freedmen, 182,
183-4, 208; and black labor, 136, 304,
318, 374-9, 385, 408, 434, 442; on blacks
as soldiers, 66, 69, 85-6, 98-9,100-1,
102; blamed for black excesses, 140, 147,
153,157,176, 259, 260; depredations of,
5, 122-5,130-1; and postwar racial
violence, 280, 281, 288-9, 428; racial
attitudes of, 125-32; and runaway
slaves, 52; see also slaves
Union Army, blacks in: abuse of families
of, 134, 239, 280, 320; casualties of, 98;
demobilization of, 271-4, 307-8, 430;
enlistment of, 48, 65-79, 97-8, 205; as
liberators, 93-7, 169; as officers, 85-6,

99; performance of, 69-70, 78, 98-101; in
politics, 508, 510; postwar experience of,

267- 74; pride of, 64,65, 69, 72, 97,

101-2, 169; recruiters of, 72-3, 73-5,
77-8, 80-1, 83-4; slave response to, 93,
96,101,168-9; southern white response
to, 87-93, 96-7, 102-3, 169-70, 267-74;
and southern whites, 65, 94-5, 97,

268- 70; treatment of, 79-93, 270-1
Union Navy, 51, 68, 69

Unionists, Southern: blacks on, 525, 548
United States Colored Troops, see Union
Army, blacks in

United States Congress: on pay of black
soldiers, 85; on recruitment of blacks,

73; support by blacks of, 506-7, 525
Utley, Jacob and Lucy (ex-slaves), 323

vagrancy laws, 319, 321, 367, 368, 370
Van Hook, John F. (ex-slave), 309-10
Vesey, Denmark (free Negro), 178, 467
Vesey, Robert, 467
Vicksburg, Miss., 38, 52, 313, 385

Victoria, Tex., 269

violence: assaults, on slaves, 10, 58, 115,
176, 182, on masters, 57, 137, 160-1, on
overseers, 137, on freed slaves, 231,
277-9, 286, 303, 373, 416, 417; lynching,
of slaves, 30, 47, 50, 160, 175, 185, of
freed slaves, 289, 303, of white man by
black troops, 269; murder, of slaves, 30,
54, 74,113-14,119, 149, 174, of masters,
147, of mistresses, 60, of overseers, 13,
146, of freed slaves, 193, 274, 275, 276-7,
278, 280, of black leader, 547, of white
planter, 415; whipping, of slaves, 8, 13,
23, 30, 48, 54, 56, 58, 65, 74, 175, of
masters, 65, 140, 147, of mistresses, 147,
of freed slaves, 277, 289, 303, 372, 373,
374, 376; see also race riots; rape
Virginia: political agitation in, 508, 511,
516, 517, 518-19, 523, 531, 533, 534-5,
548, 552; rumored slave uprising in, 47;
seeks white immigrants, 352; slave
meeting in, 26; slave runaways in, 52,

57, 58; wages in, 411; see also Richmond
Virginia Agricultural Society, 353
voters’ registration, black, 545-7, 552

Waddell, Rev. Arthur (black minister),

457, 463

Wade, Rev. Jared (black minister), 508
Wadmalaw Island, S.C., 270
Walker, Hugh, 330
Walker, Simon (ex-slave), 330
Walker, Sgt. William (black soldier), 83
Walkinshaw, James (overseer), 176
Walters, William (ex-slave), 7
War Dept., U.S., 68, 73, 79, 366
Ware, Harriet, 394
Warren County, Ga., 312
Washington, Booker T.: early education of,
472-3, 499; emancipation of, 9, 107, 187,
216; on slave loyalties, 9, 150; on
sources of news for slaves, 22
Washington, D.C., 76, 83, 441; migration
to, 514; caste pretensions of free
Negroes in, 513, 514
Washington, Ga., 274
Washington, Sam Jones (ex-slave), 188
Watkins, Sam, 239
Watson, Emma (ex-slave), 252
Weber, Capt. J. H., 385-6
Weld, Angelina Grimke, 78
West Indies, 504, 540
West Virginia, 69
Wetumpka, Ala., 288
Wheeler, Gen. Joseph, 119, 123, 133
Whipper, William J., 541-2
whipping, see violence
White, Garland H. (ex-slave, chaplain), 84,
169

White, Rev. H. H. (black minister), 91-2
Whiteside, Charles (ex-slave), 472

Index

651

Whitfield, Asa B. (ex-slave), 474, 484-5
Whiton, Rev. S. J., 490
Wilkes County, Ga., 280
Wilkins, Alice (ex-slave), 249
Williams, Charley (ex-slave), 33
Williams, Edwin S., 481
Williams, John, 32, 151
Williams, Kate, 61
Williams, Nancy (ex-slave), 464
Williams, Rev. Nick (black preacher),
551-2

Williams, Wayman (ex-slave), 453-4
Wilmington, N.C.: black troops in, 94,

95, 96, 269; race relations in, 149, 257,
289; transition of black church in,
465-6

Wilson, Douglass (black soldier), 279
Wilson, Lulu (ex-slave), 11
Wilson, Mary Jane (ex-slave), 313
Wilson, Wash (ex-slave), 36
Winston, N.C., 324
Wise, Henry A., 196
Wise, John S., 44, 111
Witherspoon, Betsey, 60-2

women, black: advice to, 245-6; attire of,

6, 116, 245, 258, 315; beauty of, 267;
black men seek to protect, 239, 267,
334-5, 522; moral code of, 243; and
political agitation, 246, 547; in postwar
labor relations, 244-5, 246, 394; resist
removal of husbands, 74, 76,113-14;
sexual exploitation of, by slaveowners,
239, 265-6, by Union soldiers, 129, 130,
by white men, 277, 280; and white
standards of beauty and fashion, 541,
544; see also children; families;
freedmen and freedwomen; house
servants; marriage; rape; sexual
practices

Wood’s Crossing, Va., 225
Woodson, James (ex-slave), 140
workers, see labor
Wright, John (ex-slave), 5
Wright, Jonathan J.: as Freedmen’s
Bureau agent in S.C., 382, 440-1, 510; in
politics, 510

Yellady, Dilly (ex-slave), 26

A Note About the Author

Leon F. Litwack was bom in Santa Barbara, California, in
1929. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the
University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently
Professor of History. Mr. Litwack has also taught at the
universities of Wisconsin and South Carolina and at Colorado
College. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a Distinguished Teaching Award, and a National
Endowment for the Humanities Film Grant, with which he
produced To Look for America in 1971.

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